Abandoned rail track in Maine

[EL34]

This popped up in Youtube

Maybe PRR can comment on this old abandoned rail line?
Have you been here PRR?

[EL34]

Looks like the guy went back to do some trail work

[shooter]

we've got a lot of small gauge beds, most of the iron is long since gone, some of the lines have been converted to hiking trails.  The South Haven runs from Kalamazoo to Lake Michigan, bike path n hiking, ~~ 30 miles

[mresistor]

Why are the putting planks down like that?

[PRR]

> Have you been here PRR?

There's a lot of "Eagle Lake"s. The one nearer me had a cog railroad, lost, now partially found. (The engine went to the Mt Washington cog railway.)

I'd say "nobody" has been to the site in the video except that guy and he says it was a rough day.

Nice selfie stick!!

MOST (it seems) of the abandoned railways here are being conserved as hiking trails (Multi-Use Rail Trails), some open to bikes. They are of course very level.
https://www.mainetrailfinder.com/trails/trail/old-pond-railway-trail
https://www.mainetrailfinder.com/trails/trail/camden-hills-state-park-interior-trail-network
https://www.mainetrailfinder.com/trails/trail/ellsworth-trail
https://www.mainetrailfinder.com/trails

Are you afraid of hills? Maine is riddled with snowmobile trails, and they get funded by a tax on snowmobiles, so in winter they are beautifully wide and smooth, and in summer they must be 99% clear.

Don't bring your bike in mud season. (Bring your 4X4 and go to the organized weekly mud races.)

[shooter]

guessing Maine, like Michigan used the original narrow gauge getting the old growth to the sawmills?
Most of the lower's rivers are too narrow and winding to float logs.  later some of the "bigger" lines were the Amazon/FedEx of the day moving from one horse towns to the big city n back.
The one that runs along M66 (the "main road" for us) was called the "Holy Roller", all the small towns Have Biblical names

[EL34]

Looks like the rail line is a hiking trail
I see blue blazes on the trees

[PRR]

... narrow gauge getting the old growth to the sawmills? Most of the lower's rivers are too narrow and winding to float logs.

Maine must have every sort of tracks, from standard (and larger at ship-launches) down to 18", for our varied terrain.

The last real log-run in Maine was 1976, noted the New York Times. Minnesota had stopped decades before.
____________________________
Last Log Drive in U.S. Floating to End in Maine
By John Kifner Special to The New York Times --     Sept. 8, 1976
SKOWHEGAN, Me.—The last log drive in America is floating to an end on the Kennebec River.

The last river drive marks the end of a timbering era in the north woods as rapid mechanization replaces the old-time woodsman skills and tools like the peavy hook and pickaroon give way to machines called skidders, slashers, stackers and chippers.
No longer will the wood come running down the water after the ice melts, floated and driven by shouting, cursing, singing “river hogs,” and caught in booms made of 40-foot lengths of spruce chained together. Now, the wood will be delivered to the new Scott Pulp Mill in 46-foot long diesel tractor-trailer trucks.
The log drive fell victim, to a certain extent, to the pressure of environmentalists, but, more important, to the changing technology and increased demands of the paper industry.
Some 30,000 cords of wood in fourfoot lengths are held in check by booms down river from here, about eight miles above the Scott mill in Winslow. The last of the wood was put into the river below Moosehead Lake on March 20, and the dive is expected to be completed at the beginning of October.

‘Cleaning the Rear’
At an eddy in the river here the other day, Buster Violet, a big, heavily muscled man who has worked the river drives for 30 years and is the foreman of the Kennebec Log Driving Company, directed some of the last of a crew of about 50 men in an operation called “cleaning the rear,” gathering in the lengths of wood dropping on, the wooded shores by high water or snagged along the river.
The work is, as they say here, “seasonable,” running from ice-out, around mid-May, to ice-in, in late November or Dedember—the state of the river having once been the most important way to measure time here. During the winter, the men get by as handymen or woodcutters or by doing a little trapping, perhaps—or they collect unemployment checks.
The spidery writing in an old leather book in the office of Robert Viles, the company's master driver, shows that when the Kennebec Log Driving Company was chartered in 1835, it had 63 member - customers, all sawmills. Today, the Scott mill is the last.
Like some of the others the rives Mr. Viles places much of the blame for the demise of the drive on environmentalists “jumping on the bandwagon.” But, he noted, because of other factors “most of the paper companies quit using the river anyway.”

Scott's Five-Year Plan
In 1970, two suits were filed seeking to stop the drive. William Perry, who lives along the river, complained in Federal court that the falling bark and debris were clogging the river and killing fish. Howard Trotzky, then a University of Maine biology graduate student and now a State Senator, went to the state courts saying that the log jams prohibited other uses of the river, like canoeing and fishing.
In 1971, under pressure from environmentalists, the State Legislature passed a law forbidding the drive after 1976. In August 1975, Federal District Court Judge Edward Gignoux ruled that the drive was in violation of the Federal Rivers and Harbors Act. Several court suits involved in the drive have still not been resolved.
In the meantime, the Scott Paper Company announced early in 1971 that, largely for economic reasons, this fall's would be the last drive. The Great Northern Paper Company held its last drive on the Penobscot River in 1971. In Minnesota, the last river drive ended 41 years ago, and there have not been river drives in the Pacific Northwest for the last several years.
continued on page 8

[PRR]

Gradually, largely because it can transport wood year-around, trucking has replaced the river drive as a way of supplying the paper industry with its growing demand for wood pulp. “It was just gtting more and more difficult to drive the volume we needed,” explained Arthur Stedman, the assistant woodlands manager for Scott's Northeast operations. “It's just more economic to go by truck.” Scott had decided back then, he said, to build its new kratt-process pulp mill at Hinkley, 13 miles upriver, and to use tree-length wood that, because of the power dams, can no longer be sent down the river. The plant will handle some 520,000 cords of pulpwood a year, about 1,500 more a day than the old mill.

. . .

In the old days, the woodsmen, clad in layers of red flannel shirts and caulked boots, lived in rough camps irt the woods. Lumber was cut in the summer and fall. With the winter, snow was packed down to form roads and the felled trees were hauled out by horses and stacked, surrounded by booms, on frozen lakes. When the thaw came, the rafts of logs were towed to the outlets and dumped into the running water, joined by other logs set along tributaries. In boats or sometimes standing on the wood, the men would work with poles or peavy hooks, a pole with a spike and clamp arrangement used to turn logs over, to prevent jamups. A jam, which would sometimes take dynamite to loosen, could unleash tremendous, sometimes fatal force. The logs would be caught by booms set below and eventually fed into a mill. Today, huge new mechanical harvestors are beginning to be used in the woods here. They run a hydraulic device up a tree, shearing the limbs, then snip off the base, working around the clock, three shifts a day. Skinners pull the trunks out of the woods and devices called stackers can unload a truck of tree-length lumber in three minutes. “I suppose you can have a lot of nostalgia,” said Mr. Stedman. “But the good old days had some disadvantages. I guess I don't miss the old iceman”

[ShoemanGB]

Why are the putting planks down like that?

A few reasons.  In wet seasons the forest floor can be unpassable for hikers in spots. Deep mud and large puddles.  Those plank runs also help preserve the forest floor and flora present.  My wife and I always joke that it's not a real Maine trail unless it has "planks" in some part.   They can be real buggers if in shady spots that let them get slimy and thus super slippery.  Some builders crosshatch them with chainsaws, some staple on chicken wire, all in attempts to give at least passable grip when wet.   I was in PRR's neighborhood last weekend on a beautiful trail that had plank sections like this as well as some impressively built wooden bridges over a stream and boulders.  I theorize there must be retired engineer types residing there that volunteered time with the trail crew and owners to design them. 
  The rails to trails things are frankly boring as far as hiking goes.  Tiny grades, as straight as possible, and in the dry season the 4 wheeler traffic makes everyone present look like Gulf War participants as they churn the dust up.

[mresistor]

Thanks Shoeman..   I haven't seen anything like that out here in CO, not that planking doesn't exist here. 

[ShoemanGB]

Thanks Shoeman..   I haven't seen anything like that out here in CO, not that planking doesn't exist here.

Colorado... sure looks like heaven in the mountains to me.  But I don't do vertical so well anymore. But we're going there someday for sure. 

[PRR]

I was in Colorado one winter. I'm in the short hair.

[ShoemanGB]

Ha!  Looks like you have mom's eyes.  And is that a half-track?!  Neato. 

[mresistor]

PRR   was that Leadville? Looks like 10th Mountain Division .. 

[ShoemanGB]

Here is one of the bridges I mentioned and a walkway over some boulders too.   The 10th Mountain has a guard unit locally and occasionally you can see them running some sort of high speed tracked winter vehicles on the road. Neat stuff.