Boothbay Railway Village Homepage

Boothbay Railway Village is a museum village in Boothbay, on the Maine coast beside the summer resort town of Boothbay Harbor, devoted to reliving the state's history. Its rail collection ties together two threads of Maine railroading. One is station preservation: the Maine Central Railroad's 1912 depot from Freeport, built after the original station burned in 1911 and in service until 1964, was transported fifty miles up the coast to Boothbay and is now on show at the village. The other is the survival of Maine's storied two-foot-gauge lines. After an 1877 demonstration on the Billerica and Bedford Railroad, several Maine railroads adopted the unusually narrow 2 ft gauge — the Monson, the Kennebec Central, the Bridgton and Saco River, the Sandy River and Rangeley Lakes, and the Wiscasset, Waterville and Farmington among them — and Boothbay Railway Village remains one of the handful of operations still running vintage Maine two-foot-gauge equipment today.