Aroostook Valley Railroad
The Aroostook Valley Railroad (AVR) is a former railway company in Maine ( United States ). It existed as an independent company from 1902 to 1996. The company was based in Presque Isle .
history
The company was founded on July 2, 1902 by the entrepreneur Arthur R. Gould and opened its lines until 1912. The main line of the railway ran from Presque Isle to Washburn and was together with a connecting line to the Aroostook River Railroad and a short branch to Perham Road opened in Washburn in 1910. The AVR then extended the route from Washburn to Caribou until the end of 1912 . In Carson, an 11.8 kilometer branch route to Sweden branched off . There were initially no connections to the Bangor and Aroostook Railroad in Washburn or Presque Isle. It was not until the early 1920s that a rail link was built in Washburn. An extension proposed in the mid-1910s from Washburn to the west across Maine to Lake Frontier in Québec was not approved because the railway company could not adequately demonstrate the benefits of such a route to the public.
The lines were built in standard gauge (1435 mm) and electrified from the start. The company obtained the electricity from Maine and New Brunswick Electrical Power Co. , which was based in Aroostook Falls (New Brunswick) . In the 1909/10 financial year, it transported 17,293 passengers and had 7 passenger railcars, 17 freight cars and a snow plow.
Since the Canadian Pacific Railway also operated a route from Presque Isle and wanted to carry out continuous freight traffic to the west of the city, it acquired the majority stake in AVR in 1932. The electrical operation was given up in 1946 in favor of diesel trains after the railway company had already operated on December 12. July 1945 bought two GE 44-ton switcher diesel locomotives. Passenger traffic also ended in 1946. Arthur R. Gould died two weeks before electrical operations and passenger traffic ceased.
The gradual dismantling of the network began with the Carson – Sweden section in 1978. After the Canadian Pacific closed its route to Presque Isle in 1987, the AVR acquired the section from Washburn Junction to Presque Isle from this company. Bangor & Aroostook built a connecting track to the former Canadian-Pacific station in Presque Isle. This traffic ended in 1992, however, and the AVR built a new link from the Skyway Branch, a connecting railway built in 1941 to an Air Force Base west of Presque Isle, directly to the Mapleton – Presque Isle railway line operated by Bangor & Aroostook. Of the main line, only the eight-kilometer section from Skyway Junction to Park Siding had been in operation since 1987, but was also closed in 1993 together with the branch to the Canadian-Pacific route.
Until April 26, 1996 the AVR Güterverkehr drove on the remaining connecting line to the Skyway Industry Park, the former airbase. Today the route (4.5 kilometers in total) is owned by the city of Presque Isle and is still served by the Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway , the legal successor to Bangor & Aroostook.
attachment
credentials
- ^ Poor's Manual of Railroads, 44th Annual Number. Poor's Railroad Manual Co., 1911, p. 2061.
- ↑ Certificate for the dissolution of the Aroostook Valley Railroad ( memento of the original from September 23, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 93 kB)
literature
- Charles D. Heseltine, Edwin B. Robertson: Aroostook Valley Railroad. Robertson Books, Westbrook, ME 1987.
- Edward A. Lewis: American Shortline Railway Guide. (5th edition) Kalmbach Publishing, Waukesha, WI 1996, ISBN 0-89024-290-9 .
- Robert M. Lindsell: The Rail Lines of Northern New England. Branch Line Press, Pepperell, MA 2000, ISBN 0-942147-06-5 .