Wiscasset, Waterville & Farmington Railway Museum

The two-foot-gauge line the museum preserves began service on February 20, 1895 as the Wiscasset and Quebec Railroad and was reorganized in 1901 as the Wiscasset, Waterville and Farmington Railway after plans to cross the Belfast and Moosehead Lake Railroad near Burnham Junction fell through — the railway never reached Quebec, instead linking Wiscasset with Albion and Winslow in mid-coast Maine. It earned its keep on potatoes, lumber, poultry, and general freight alongside passengers. Road competition in the late 1920s pushed the company into the hands of Frank Winter, a businessman with lumber interests in Palermo whose scheme to pair the railroad with two cargo schooners collapsed when a locomotive derailment halted operations on June 15, 1933; most of the line was scrapped after Winter died in 1936. Beginning in 1989, a non-profit organization took up the WW&F name as a museum, rebuilding 3.5 miles of the original route in the town of Alna and restoring surviving pieces of former WW&F rolling stock to create a working heritage railroad that even hauls occasional cargo.