Photo by Unknown photographer, via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)
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About Sandy River and Rangeley Lakes Railroad
Ride a genuine two-foot gauge railroad on the original trackbed in Phillips, Maine. The nonprofit Sandy River and Rangeley Lakes Railroad revives a short stretch of the 112-mile narrow gauge system that once threaded Franklin County, operating preserved equipment from the historic line itself. It's a living museum of Maine's famous two-footers, set in the small town that served as the original railroad's shop headquarters.
History
The original Sandy River and Rangeley Lakes Railroad was Maine two-foot gauge railroading at its peak: a 2 ft narrow gauge common carrier operating roughly 112 miles of track across Franklin County. Gardiner banker Josiah S. Maxcy won legislative approval in 1891 to consolidate the Sandy River Railroad and Phillips and Rangeley Railroad, and after years of common management the constituent lines formally merged as the SR&RL in January 1908. The railroad ran as a Maine Central subsidiary from 1912 until 1923, when unpaid bond interest — and a February 1923 roundhouse fire at Phillips that damaged eight of its thirteen operational locomotives — pushed it into receivership. Traffic, dominated by pulpwood, drained away to highway trucking; the last steam train left Rangeley in May 1931, the railroad was sold at auction to a scrap firm, service ended on July 2, 1935, and the remaining rails were lifted in 1936. The revival began in 1970, when railfans at the Phillips Historical Society organized to document the line and later formed a separate nonprofit under the historic railroad's name to preserve surviving equipment. That heritage railroad continues to operate today on the original SR&RL trackbed at Phillips.
The Trains
What sets the operation apart is authenticity: former equipment from the original SR&RL continues to operate on the revived segment of the railway at Phillips. The historic railroad was a two-foot gauge system whose Phillips shop built its own rolling stock — including gasoline railcars No. 3 and No. 4 in the spring of 1925 and railcar No. 5 over the winter of 1926-27 — while Maine Central's Portland Terminal shops supplied box cars, flat cars, and cabooses in the 1910s.
Nearby
Phillips is a town of about 900 people in Franklin County, Maine, drained by the Sandy River in the foothills of the Rangeley Lakes region. It grew prosperous as the lumbering center for the Rangeley country, first shipping timber by ox-drawn sledge until the narrow gauge Sandy River Railroad arrived in 1879, connecting to the Maine Central at Farmington. State routes 4, 142, and 149 cross here, and the surrounding towns of Madrid, Weld, and Avon frame a quiet corner of western Maine mountain country.
Where to Stay
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