A Sunday Drive

Saturday's shenanigans up in Lincoln suggested sleeping in, but Alicia had to get up for work so I ended up with a reasonably early start. Seal was still cranked pretty far up when I started the engine so I took the opportunity to blast the practically perfect pop song en route to the gym; we were off to a good start. 100 free throws and some upper-body lifts later, the sun had come out and I had my sights set on the beach.

I cut across Somersworth noting the great road names (Cecile St, Rita St, the ridiculous Congress St / Alicia St 4-way) and wondering how Indigo Hill got its name and why Old Indigo Hill Rd is so far south of the current model. Cruised past the recently-visited Somersworth Riverwalk (a few pretty spots, but short) and the wastewater treatment plant and into Maine. I had a hair to try traversing Love Brook Rd from its NW end, with the four-sign intersection at its endpoint and the ridiculous Berwick Rd / Town Rd setup as additional attractions, but worried about mud. Not remembering which side of New Dam Road all of this was on, I left things to fate by turning right and was in downtown South Berwick before I knew it.

Well, it had two years since my last visit to Dennett Rd, I was curious to see what (if any) memorial was up for Camden Hughes, and it seemed like enough time had passed since the tragedy. Scooting up Rt 4, I was thrilled to see a new sign for a business with Lovers Brook in its name, although I didn't catch the full sign text. In my view, if you've got a chance to connect to a name like that, you gotta take it, although Alicia believes the name to actually be rather mundane.

(As an aside, the name of the brook and the dirt road that crosses it seem to be out of sync; I suspect that the -rs ending is correct. Google Maps is off-base and lame with "Old Blackberry Hill Rd".) The brook isn't very impressive as it crosses under the railroad tracks and Route 4, but it gets a bit more formidable before flowing into the Great Works.

Anyway, Dennett Rd came soon. It has an awkward reverse-curve (or something) relationship with Route 4. Dad has told me that it's probably part of a former alignment of Route 4 that was replaced with a smoother-curving version. My Delorme Atlas shows the other half of the old alignment as a road as well, and a North Berwick tax map actually gives it a name - Allen Rd.

Note that the unlabeled portion of the loop is the beginning of Dennett Rd. You can see a hint of the power line / gas line Right of Way - yes, the same one as three posts ago - and I left my car there in front of these signs.

I took it as evidence that this area was also seeing an unusual amount of activity in conjunction with the Power Reliability Program.

First, I walked up the pipeline / power line right of way in search of indications that a train (the PS&P) once ran through there. There was passage over a nearby brook (later confirmed to be Hussey Brook) but it was too huge and grass-grown to be called a bridge - maybe the brook ran through a culvert?

There were a fairly long row of stones like this one in a row on one side. I don't know what they were for. To define the edge of a bridge, maybe - there was a marginal drop-off behind them but I didn't sense that they were on an edge. Fearing ticks (I forgot to bring anything but my gym shorts and swimsuit), I didn't venture far into the tall grass of the ROW.

Back at the car, I exchanged expressionless glances with a guy on a scooter and looked for signs of the other half of the old alignment. There wasn't much resembling a road, but a short, narrow path led to this.

That's today's Route 4 in the background of the second picture.

In my unprofessional opinion, the pile of wreckage didn't seem like it could have once been a bridge on the main drag, the Portland Road. But, I don't have any ideas on what else it could have been. Interesting, the Google Maps Satellite view shows something that looks like a still-standing bridge.

Sorry about the inconsistency of image sizes; at least they now link to larger-sized images, at least.

Later, back at the homestead, I was searching for ways to confirm that the "Allen Rd" / Dennett Rd combination was in fact an old Rt 4 alignment. Fortunately, the 1941 map of Wells that was a "you'll be leaving here soon" Christmas present several years ago also showed this corner of North / South Berwick.

Route 4 is labeled. Near the "B.M." intersection in the lower left, it intersects with Dennett Rd and almost the PS&P! It's labeled B&M since Eastern had long since gone belly-up and the B&M had taken over the line. We see that the old alignment did track today's "Allen Rd" and end of Dennett Rd, that the gas line right of way continued to follow the old PS&P alignment this far, and that Dennett Rd really does chop off a lot of distance if you're headed to the Wells / Ogunquit area. Too bad it's a dirt track and barely passable for much of its length today.

Also, the dashed line that runs between Rt 4 and Dennett Rd is shown on the North Berwick map as Gould's Bridge Rd (Rt 4 end) and Company Woods Rd (Dennett Rd end). Google Maps does not show a bridge over the Great Works River on Gould's Bridge Rd, but the name is an obvious suggestion that there once was one. Something for another day. After crossing Dennett Rd, the dashed line on the full map goes all the way to Thurrell Rd but today it just runs to a few houses before disappearing completely.

Anyway, I left the car and hoofed it up the road a ways. I reached my planned turn-around point of the Company Woods Rd 4-way and thought there was nothing to see before noticing the memorial site off to one side.

A baffling, sad incident, to be sure, that provoked some interesting reactions.

The walk back went by faster, despite having to studiously avoid eye contact with more drivers than I would have liked, and I headed for Ogunquit. North Berwick, like South Berwick, wound up with main roads a short distance away from where its railroads intersected but unlike South Berwick, its "downtown" was built around the railroads. Today, now that there is no railroad station, the town suffers from the lack of a clearly identifiable downtown. The Main St area by the train tracks has more of a "downtown" feel, but is on neither of the town's two state highways and is not on the road to anything except Ogunquit.

Just over the modern B&M tracks, I saw a sign for Eastern Ave - highly suspicious! I swerved down it but didn't get too far before it was gated. Looks like there's a wastewater treatment plant beyond the gate. The map confirmed my suspicions - Eastern Ave runs on the former route of the Eastern Railroad!

That's it for points of interest, but it was a nice rest of the day. I learned via mom she was bringing my grandmother (90 years old) up from Mass. for her annual two months in that side of the family's old family summer house in Ogunquit. The house has been falling apart for years, but it withstood another winter and through August will house my grandmother and three European summer workers, including one we've known for several years.

I spread newspaper under the bird cage and fiddled with the ancient radio until it was once again blasting WBach - the birds love it and my grandmother doesn't like to wear her hearing aid. Later, Mom and I walked the Marginal Way and it was like one of those movie scenes where they quickly pan from some deserted scene to a crowded city street. Tourist season...well, it's not all that bad, really, at least for one day. A trip to Newington for groceries and softball gear and the Spaulding over The Bridge completed the loop back to Dover.

Picture post

I recently added a picture to my Blogspot (Blogger, now, I guess) profile not only because I love tuxedo cats but because I found the text on the photo's webpage to be randomly compelling:

"Let’s look at the beauty of a tuxedo cat. For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of knowing a tuxedo, they are black cats with white paws and bellies, and they often have white on their faces. The stark contrast between the shiny black fur and the glistening white patches creates a strikingly handsome animal. I don’t want to imply that black is negative and white is positive — they are both beautiful, but opposite. No gray exists anywhere on their bodies. Tuxedos are black and white — no in-between. The colors blend together to make an individual full of character. Tuxedos teach us about loving and learning from both aspects of life. Every situation has the potential for a positive and negative outcome — it is we who determine what that outcome will be.

Tuxedos show us not to resist duality, but to embrace it. There is nothing in life that is free of a positive and a negative dual nature. The good news is that despite being in the midst of negativity, there is a positive solution. In every cloud, there is a silver lining waiting to be discovered. And within that same cloud is the potential for a rain storm.

The gray zone of life is an illusion; it is a place of our own making. When situations become uncomfortable, our human nature requires that we find an underlying reason for our circumstances. We often blame someone else for creating our drama. We don’t want to look at both aspects — the black and the white, the good and the bad, the positive and the negative."

http://qdfriends.wordpress.com/2010/10/19/a-%E2%80%9Ctuxedo%E2%80%9D-cat/

The Portsmouth, Great Falls, and Conway

Writing about walking the old Portland, Saco, and Portsmouth (PS&P) right-of-way got me jazzed up about South Berwick's railroad history. An evening at the library revealed many sites to check out and I had a chance to head to some of them earlier today.

First, let's review:

Three railroads ran through South Berwick at one time. The PS&P, the Boston & Maine (B&M), and the Portsmouth, Great Falls, and Conway (PGF&C since I guess we must).

The PS&P came first in 1842. It is primarily associated with the Eastern Railroad, which competed with the B&M for about 40 years; however, the section between South Berwick and Portland was jointly leased by the Eastern and B&M for about 30 of those years. Both of those companies wanted to offer a route to Portland and it was easiest to use the existing track. I suspect that whoever built the PS&P did so with such a lease arrangement in mind. Its track is now the gas line / power line right of way, although the gas line seems to be more consistently aligned as evidenced below:

As an aside, you can learn so much from tax maps! Viva l'internet and thanks to the town of South Berwick for putting them there!

SW of Emery's Bridge Road (the route of the recent walk), the gas line land (12-80) and CMP land (12-95) are side-by-side. But, then the CMP cut turns more sharply east while the gas line continues over the Knights Pond causeway, which we know to be the old railroad route. You can see that they come closer once again, then go their separate ways near Dennett Road, with Google Maps' satellite view. Try it!

Anyway, so we've got the PS&P running from Portland to Agamenticus Junction, south to Kittery, into NH over a predecessor to the Sarah Mildred Long ("Middle") bridge, and onto Boston. The track on the bridge is still used occasionally to transport waste from the Naval Shipyard.

Today's trip began with a drive over the Sarah Long bridge. No pictures, but I conveniently have some 2-year old video from a boat trip up the river with Mom, Jim, and Jim's brother Chip.

Railroad #2 is the Boston & Maine. It had run track from Dover to South Berwick, but not beyond there. Upon entering into the PS&P lease agreement, it built a spur to Agamenticus Junction to join with the PS&P main line. After the lease agreement ended, they built their own line and that's the line now used by the Downeaster.

The third railroad is the most confounding and mysterious, and thus of course the most compelling. The track in South Berwick was originally built to connect to Great Falls (remember, that's Somersworth) but didn't serve much of a purpose before it was folded into the larger PGF&P project. It left the PG&P at "Jewett" - near today's 91/236 intersection - wound its way to downtown South Berwick, crossed the river near the B&M and road crossings, and merged with some B&M - constructed track a bit south of Great Falls, where the merged line met the line from Conway.

Fun fact: That B&M line was a spur line to Great Falls that left its Dover - South Berwick train in Salmon Falls (remember, that's Rollinsford), so there were actually two trains between Salmon Falls and Great Falls for a while. Strange, but for about 10 years there were also two trains between South Berwick and North Berwick. The jury's still out on which of those is most guffaw-worthy.

Funner fact: When Rt. 236 swings left near the Rt 91 intersection, it is actually moving onto the former route of the PGF&P! So, as you drive north from Marshwood High, you move from one old rail corridor to another. Where you leave that corridor and where it goes after that is less clear.

Funnest fact: The PG&P and PSF&P combined at Jewett with the help of a turntable; the turntable "pit" remains are very much visible and are actually just off of Rt. 236, at Fife Rd. I can't believe I never noticed it in 8 bazillion trips up and down 236.

I really hope that isn't a giant mushroom in the last photo.

The sign in the second one is too cryptic to be of much use to me yet. Need to spend some more quality time with the books to get all the name changes, bankruptcies, and buyouts straight. I think "dizzying" is the operative word here.

The lawn around the pit was very nicely mowed. Thank you, landowner!

From here, I took Fife Rd to Oldfields Rd and Dover-Eliot Rd (101) to avoid downtown South Berwick. A nice side effect is having to had Oldfields Rd to the "places it'd be okay to live" list. Lots of interesting old houses.

After crossing into NH, I took Sligo Rd (named by the region's Irish settlers) through some absolutely gorgeous woods / farmland. Maximum verdance. "Very reminiscent of the Seattle area" says this somewhat-elitist-for-having-lived-there (however briefly).

Eventually, I ended up in Salmon Falls village and set off in search of PGF&C bridge remains. I was armed with memories of last night's big breakthrough.

Jackpot!, even though I have no idea what "Northern Line" refers to. This map is from 1925. Thank you, Dover library online resources! Your local library...even more awesome than online tax maps. Well, that's debatable.

Having not printed the map out, I couldn't remember where to start and first went too far south, around the back of an old mill turned into small businesses. There was a nice view back up-river but nothing that looked like a bridge.

One book had said that a station house on the line had survived until 1995 (50+ years after the line was abandoned) and was being turned into a park. So, I looked for a park.

I found one N of Main St just over the bridge from Maine. The image ahead looked promising. I doubted very much that the railroad had left an underpass in its trestle for what is today a heavily pot-holed dirt road. It must have been the PGF&P. Indeed, the 1925 map confirms this.

(The underpass on the left is for Church St, which was Dover St in 1925 but was a relatively major road both then and now.)

Now I knew roughly how the line ran in Rollinsford but still had nothing on how it came from Maine. So, I headed for the Main St bridge, paused to respond unnecessarily frumpily to a friendly phone call, and finally spotted some evidence.

With the Main St bridge on the left:

Now, this could just be part of an old road bridge, but I really don't think it is. Its placement is just too perfectly in line with the "steel trestle" from the map. Nothing that looked like an abutment on either side jumped out; returning with a printed copy of the map might help.

With the rain having cancelled the evening's softball plans, there was time to search out where the PGF&P met with the B&M Great Falls spur. I had previously located it using Google Maps.

The B&M spur is closely tracked by today's Somersworth Rd (Main St on the Somersworth side). The PGF&P came in on a curving line from the East. They appear to have come together about where today's road and railroad cross. Not sure if that's a coincidence, or what.

Old Indigo Hill Rd was signed as such and paved, but in pretty poor shape and not really a two-lane road. There wasn't a great place to park and I was ready for dinner, but an obvious trail intersected the road right where the assumed rail corridor appears on the map.

Yes, there were signs, but no, I don't remember what they said. -1 for me.

I headed home pondering how one seems to cross train tracks so frequently when driving between Dover, Rollinsford, and Somersworth. No wonder, with the B&M main line and the Salmon Falls - Great Falls spur both in the area. The spur is still used as part of the Northcoast Railroad, but that one will have to be its own adventure.

Not bad for a Wednesday! Boy, do I love summer.

Power line dreams: Return to South Berwick

The past few weeks have seen me several times in my one-time hometown of South Berwick.

- My dad sold his condo after a year and a week on the market. I claimed some furniture and helped him move the rest. Memories of crowds at Aggie's Ice Cream Parlor and how best to get out of Old Mill bubbled up to the surface.

- Alicia and I toured the historic Sarah Orne Jewett and Hamilton houses on Historic New England's open house day. We shot twin evil eyes at the guy who refused to refrain from photography, pictured the often-backed-up Routes 4 and 236 concurrency as a cart path, and grinned at the serenity on the Hamilton's grounds and gardens. I don't know if it's particularly nice or if I just underrated river frontage, but the land on both sides of the area around where the Cocheco and Salmon Falls rivers come together to form the Piscataqua is Really Really Nice. There was a particular spot where gardens opened up on both sides of a stone path, with an imposingly broad side of the house in the background. Arrestingly near-perfect symmetry.

We enjoyed decent food and huge portions at the Asia Cafe (gotta love those Chinese-place lunch specials) and picked up a couple of overstock books at the new-ish Mercantile shop. One of those early-summer days which detaches itself from the calendar with everyone in a good mood.

- The next day, after we explored an old road on the Dover-Rollinsford line (a trip that deserves its own post), Alicia went to work and I had a chance to close out the SB experience. Bear with me as there's some personal back story and (hopefully more interesting) local railroad history to go with this one.

One of the first things I did after downloading Google Earth during the winter of '09 was to zoom all the way in on this image:

The south end of this shot is where Rt. 236 swings left after being unnaturally straight for a while after the Dover-Eliot Rd / 101 intersection. Dad had told me that that section of road followed an old railroad grade, but I hadn't really put two and two together until seeing the overhead shot. In the summer, there is a farm stand ahead on the grade where the road swings left towards downtown SB. Where it intersects Route 91 are three mailboxes, but no houses are visible down the good two-lane gravel road.

Over my year as a resident, I knocked off other targets - Great Hill Rd, Love Brook Rd, Dennett Road (especially from the Boyds Corner Rd end), and Crooker Lane. This one eluded me, though, as I couldn't decide whether to walk or drive and was afraid of meeting hostile homeowners some distance up the road. I was also convinced that the road needed to have a name - otherwise, how did the mail get delivered? I [very] briefly contemplated opening the mailboxes to see if there was anything inside with an address. The usually reliable South Berwick planning board minutes and dearly departed South Berwick Citizen didn't provide a road name, but the prospect of (literally) miles of good road/trail remained exciting and I really wanted to know whether there was a bridge (or any remnants thereof) over the Great Works like the causeway over Knights Pond.

Wait, what causeway? You betcha! The causeway, intriguing gravel road, and Route 236 alignment are all nearly perfectly aligned and were part of the route of the Portland, Saco, and Portsmouth railroad. Near the causeway, it intersected an old alignment of the Boston & Maine (now used by Amtrak for the Downeaster and freight trains) at South Berwick Junction / Agamenticus Station. Yes, there really were two railroads (and a station) near today's Junction Rd. Sadly, it took me until this year to realize that's where Junction Rd got its name.

The P, S &P ran from Portsmouth into Eliot and South Berwick, then turned northeast and passed through North Berwick, the Kennebunks, Saco, and eventually Portland. The Boston & Maine (today's Amtrak) also heads through North Berwick but then takes a more coastal route to today's large station in Wells and beyond.

Complicating the issue are two things:

1) The section of the B&M that ran to South Berwick Junction has been abandoned and is no longer visible (you can barely see it on some aerial shots). If you take the Downeaster from Dover today, you stay on the NW side of Route 4 until North Berwick and don't go near Agamenticus Rd. My guess is that this rerouting was done after the P, S & P was discontinued and there was no longer a reason for a detour.

2) A third railroad also once passed through South Berwick - the Portsmouth, Great Falls, and Conway. Dazzle your friends by asking them what Rollinsford and Somersworth were once named and then telling them it's Salmon Falls and Great Falls. Actually, Salmon Falls isn't too hard to come up with - the downtown village retains that name - and you'll find Great Falls in the name of many downtown Somersworth villages.

This confused me to no end for a long time because I got "two abandoned railroads met at Agamenticus" into my head and assumed that one of them must have been the Portsmouth, Great Falls, and Conway...but it's not. That one ran closer to the coast, but I'm not sure exactly where - or why it came into Maine at all. This could be helpful, but where is Brock's Crossing? And, why did the line cross into Maine for short stretches not once, but twice? Weren't bridges expensive?

Here are a couple of sites with more SB railroad info. Now, back to your regularly scheduled walk.

A new year brought a new approach: approach the Great Works from the Emery's Bridge end to the north. I didn't think there were any houses on that section of road - except for those very close to Emery's Bridge Rd. Crooker Rd (the road next to the cemetery across from The Lunch Box) runs almost to the ROW, but has a creepy house part of the way in. So, I cut through the purported future home of Our Lady of Angels church - for now, just a meadow.

I parked in one of the Willow St field lots and the walk up Agamenticus Rd was routine. I sweated lightly in my tick-avoidance long sleeves and windpants. Bore right at the sign; the meadow grass was about chest-high. As the trees converged, the remaining grassland aimed at the Crooker Ln house so I entered the woods. It got muddy for just long enough for me to wish I'd worn hiking boots, but quickly firmed up. I guess that's not a surprise; you wouldn't want to run a railroad or power lines through a bog.

The woods were fairly open and I'd guess that I wasn't the first to head this way. Nothing resembling a trail, but superior routes suspiciously presented themselves. It was probably only 10 minutes before I hit the ROW and turned right. The power lines were in a gully to the SE; the road sat high and was in fine shape, 10-12 feet wide. "Warning: Gas line" signs popped up every so often.

In my haste to get going, I forgot to leave something to mark where I'd popped out of the woods for reentry purposes. No matter, I could always just walk out to the road. Sunday afternoon with the Red Sox winning seemed like a pretty safe time to saunter out.

The road itself wasn't particularly interesting or scenic, but my adrenaline remained high as I wondered what would come at the river. Occasionally, four-wheeler side trails split off into the gully or the woods; the road itself was straight as an arrow. With nothing to obstruct it, the chain-link fence in front of the Great Works was visible from a fair distance. It was easy to go around the fence to the river's edge, and a rock structure built into the riverbank looked to be part of the remains of the old bridge, but nothing jutted out into the river except for the gas line; that's the faintly visible line on satellite photos.

Once again, rivers are really pretty! This year's high snowfall / runoff and May rains only helped the Great Works, I'm sure.

From there, I was able to get out easily to the nearest paved road and back to my car; in the interest of not publicizing every last adventure area, that'll be left as the proverbial exercise for the reader (you can also email me for more info, but it's basically the path of least resistance).

After reading more on the South Berwick website after getting home, I concluded that the houses across the river have York Woods Rd (Route 91) addresses such that the CMP road is effectively just a very long driveway. I wonder who plows it, though, and if you could build a house there given modern road frontage requirements......

On the other side of Emery's Bridge Rd, the power lines continue alongside a four-wheeler trail. Although the CMP right-of-way is less well defined so that adventurers need to stay more mindful of private land ownership, I bet there's some great exploring on that side, too!