In April, the Wiscasset Waterville & Farmington Railway Museum in Alna, ME held their annual photo excursion.  The WW&F has been on my to-do list for a couple years and the opportunity to attend finally presented itself this year.  The day started in the yard with some locomotive maintenance and switching before moving out onto the line.

Out on the line we made several stops including Cockeye Curve:

Humason Trestle:

Alna Center:

And Top of the Mountain:

The WW&F Ry Museum is dedicated to historical accuracy in just about everything they do. While modern machinery is sometimes used where necessary, the old fashioned way is preferred wherever possible. Case and point was the removal of about 330ft of rail at Davis Grade. They needed to remove the rail to facilitate the correction of some roadbed issues and while they could have easily used modern machinery to pull the rail, they chose to do it by hand just as it was done in 1937 when the line was scrapped. Even more incredible was the fact that the flat car that was used by the original WW&F Ry to scrap the line is back in service at the WW&F Ry Museum today. Since none of the WW&F’s locomotives were operable in 1937, they used draft horses to pull the flat car. All of this was recreated for the photographers assembled this spring. Why? Because they can!

The day ended with a night session produced by Stephen Hussar and his crew. The night session actually started before dark in the machine shop where we found a mechanic working on the Railway’s Ford Model T Railcar:

Once Blue Hour hit, we moved outside to work with the Train Crew and Locomotive #9:

Needless to day it was a fun day photographically and I’m looking forward to a return trip, hopefully next year.