8mm Forum: Two Foot Gauge in Maine

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Posted by Steve Klare (Member # 12) on April 08, 2016, 09:56 AM:

Sandy River and Rangeley Lakes Engine #24, Carrabassett, Maine 1935

Two Foot Gauge in Maine (Sunday River Productions, 1x200 FT, Black and White, Silent)

This is a little unusual as film reviews go. Yes, it’s the story of a Super-8 print, but it is also the story of time, and history and film, and how the three mix together.

I will grant you it’s a long road, but it actually starts centuries back! Please stay with me and I’ll tell you a story about what one reel of silent, star-less film really can stand for.

We live in the Internet Age, all of us everywhere are linked together by this invisible thread and we can communicate and experience different places and ideas and it IS wonderful, but It’s not the first time something like this has happened.

Not very long ago as history is measured, the average human being never travelled more than 5 miles from where they were born: life was at a walking pace and their whole universe pretty much stretched about as far as the horizon. New experiences were rare, strangers usually meant trouble and the necessities of life came from hard, dangerous, sometimes futile work, luxury was living under a roof that didn’t leak: life was short, scary and pretty bleak. Throughout history things kept happening to change this and the world kept getting smaller. Once it was Roman roads, sailing ships and post offices. When the telegraph came along some said it would lead to world peace because with such extensive and rapid communications misunderstandings among peoples would never grow large enough to become hostile. (Obviously, it didn’t work out that way…)

The Internet of the late nineteenth century was no doubt the railroad. Much like the Internet far off places were now drawn much closer, and people could interact with distant territory and goods and services flowed like never before in history.

Back from mid 1800s on railroads were being built everywhere and it became a craze. Crews were often racing to beat their opponents laying track into coveted regions to the point of gunfire being exchanged. Sometimes miles of useless track were laid in the middle of nowhere just to stake a claim and cut off the competition, much of it was later ripped up. Fortunes were made and lost and the world changed faster than ever before.

The fact that there were little towns in wilderness regions that in no way could support a regular railroad didn’t stop them for a minute: they just came up with smaller trains that could.

The narrow gauge movement in the United States is often considered to have started in Wales. Half sized trains running on rails two feet apart became fairly common there and people the world over took notice. Most people who brought the idea back here thought two foot gauge trains would be a little too tippy and compromised out to three feet. One New Hampshire railroad pioneer stayed true to the original, so that the (umm)…standard narrow gauge in New England, Maine in particular, remained the Welsh 24 inches.

There were five of these lines there: ranging all the way from 4 miles up to 120. They did basically everything a standard gauge line did just smaller, simpler and cheaper. For the most part they were very successful and they lasted for more than a generation.

They were wonderful little lines operating in spectacular country: forests, lakes and seacoasts. They brought tourists to great hotels in lake country and carried minerals and wood out and supplied the necessities of life to the communities they served. They thrived in hostile country: Maine winters are legendary for their brutality, yet just by virtue of the fact they didn’t need to move as much snow out of the way to get through, they often struggled into the Junction long before their standard gauge connection showed up.

Their stories were very human ones. These were companies with never even fifty employees and their lives, families and personalities figure prominently in their history. They were hard working men who spent their days battling blizzards, mechanical failures, accidents, and floods and still kept the schedule. They were frontier people in their own right, and there are stories of the enginemen shooting deer from the cabs so they could feed their families. Being Mainers there is a lot of classic Yankee Ingenuity: adapting whatever they could grab a hold of to get the job done.

While all this was happening, the second part of this story was happening over in Rochester, New York. The amateur photography business was nothing new. People had been snapping pictures of houses, horses, children and Main Street for decades. Cinematography was also in a golden age. Kodak was making countless miles of 35mm film stock and it was lighting up screens the world over.

What was missing was cinema for the same people that were shooting stills. Sure there were amateurs shooting 35mm movies, but it was bulky, expensive and impractical for some guy in a straw hat on a picnic and a budget. Something less demanding was needed for it to become common.

Once again: the standard size was too much, so something smaller was invented to do the job. In 1923 Kodak premiered the new 16mm film gauge. This was called “sub-standard” by professional cinematographers, others called it “narrow gauge”, which for obvious reasons I like!

This went over in a big way. All of a sudden footage was being shot of everyday life by ordinary people. Here was the rise of real historic film: not reality filtered through a script and a studio and the editing bench, but real life on screen: weddings, parades, firemen at work, vacations and people fishing and falling out of rowboats. There was also a great deal of footage of trains.

Railroads and early film have a natural chemistry. Industry pioneers announced they’d captured moving images and could reproduce them too…now what? For years filmmakers looked for moving, interesting subjects to film before they got around to doing a scripted story (oddly enough: “The Great Train Robbery” in 1903.) There were garden parties and horse races, boxing matches and weight lifting. There were also railroads. ”L'Arrivée d'un Train en Gare de la Ciotat” was among the Lumiere Brothers first major “blockbusters”: just a train arriving at a station.

This is where it really starts to come together. In the 1930s there was this young man named Albert G. Hale. He was a railroad fan, and even more importantly he had a Model A Ford and a 16mm movie camera. His passion took him all over the Depression Era United States and he filmed interesting trains. He was going to college in Boston and had a friend there named Hugh Montgomery. Hugh was from Phillips, Maine: home of the biggest of the two foot gauge lines, Sandy River and Rangeley Lakes.

The years since the end of WWI were not kind to SR&RL. The forests that had provided it traffic were cut way back and trucks were taking much of the little depression-starved business that remained. The line was actually holding its own profit and loss wise, except loan payments for all the money they’d borrowed in boom times were pushing them into the red. The writing was on the wall.

Hugh urged Albert G. Hale to come up to Maine with him in the Spring of 1935 and film the SR&RL while there was still time. After that, Albert was hooked and toured the state, filming all of the four lines still in existence.

A few months later SR&RL ran its last train and was sold to a scrap iron firm. Japan was building up its navy and scrap steel was getting top prices. By the fall of 1936 the last rail was lifted, the last engine cut up and today most of the atoms and molecules that once made up this great railroad are at the bottom of the Pacific.

Albert G. Hale’s photographs and footage still exist as a great historic record. Before he passed away not very long ago he donated it all to his local historical society to see to that.

This sounds like the end, but it’s only kind of the middle. Let’s skip forward about 40 years.

(-now it gets PERSONAL!)

When I was a growing up, my big thing was trains. I lived and breathed them, maybe even to excess. This was not all for bad: it’s proven to be a great influence in my life. For example when I was in the third grade my Dad promised to set up that long stored train set he had, and I knew about keenly. Obviously I needed to do something to prepare! All I could think of was doing the wiring, so I got the “Golden Book of Electricity” out of the school library and learned about batteries, switches and lightbulbs. Quite a few years later I got my engineering degree. Today I work for the US Department of Energy.

-could have been worse!

Something that caught my fancy back then was those same narrow gauge lines of Maine: they were different, interesting! I began to model them in my parents’ basement and read every book I could find about them.

One day when I was 16 I was reading a railroad magazine and drifted onto a print ad. for Sunday River Productions Super-8 Archival Railroad Films.

-“They’ll never have anything of the Two Footers…Holy Crap!, they DO!”

I had a problem: I desperately wanted to see this movie. They lady across the street had a projector, but my family didn’t! It didn’t matter. I got on my bike, went to the bank, got a check, wrote a letter and took the whole mess to the Post Office.

-and on that day, one hobby spawned another!

A week or so later, I got it back, this nice pleasant, red plastic, 200 foot reel of brand new film in a perfect, new white card box…but what to do?!! I didn’t have any means of watching the footage that day, and being a teenager I had absolutely no patience, so I decided to look at the frames. (My eyes were MUCH better back then!) I pulled back my blanket and started un-reeling yards and yards of film onto my bedsheets (-yes, the idea horrifies me too, just like a lot of things teenagers do…)

Those of us that only use projectors to see movies have no idea how long 220 feet of Super-8 film is in real life…… and should hope they never find out!

A few days later Mrs. Davidson set up her GAF projector and tripod screen and we watched. It was absolutely magical and it still is. Scenes I had only encountered in the pages of books were there, moving and alive: not just stories, but presence. It was as close to time travel as somebody who’d arrived thirty years too late could ever hope for!

Some years later I started driving up to Maine and visited the old places: the empty grades and stations out in the middle of nowhere, and I met a much older Hugh Montgomery volunteering in the Railroad Room at the Phillips Historical society. He told me stories of himself, his college friend Albert and pointed out the couple of places in the film he appears on screen as a young man in a suit and fedora. I also saw it as a 16mm print at their movie night.

The Review? (…Sorry!)

This film is made up from Albert G. Hale’s footage of three of the lines he shot that spring with Hugh Montgomery. The fourth got its own film (which I bought a month or so later). Al Hale was a good amateur film maker and became an even better historian, but he was no Albert Hitchcock. There are often signs of a guy who knew the train was coming and realized too late he didn’t have film in the camera (I speak from experience here…), so there are shots that were started on the run and hand held. There is this one awesome shot where he is filming a train passing by until he obviously has twisted his body as far as it will go, so he twists back and the footage now seems to show that same train suddenly accelerating to about 200 MPH! There are lines from the original footage here and there, printed in hairs and perforations on screen letting us know that he’d reached the end of the roll and it was time to load a new one.

-but that’s what is wonderful here! This isn’t a polished take thirty-three of some glitzy Hollywood musical with makeup and scripts and scenery and an orchestral score they dubbed in later. It is gritty, imperfect reality raw from a wind-up camera more than 80 years ago. It is some anonymous guy capturing a real moment in time that very shortly will be gone forever! If not for him on that one day so long ago, it would be lost and all there would be now is stories in books.

Granted, this film has a major back story and to really appreciate what you are seeing you really need to read those books, but then again the experience of the film improves the books as well.

Sound? Unless it’s still echoing up in the mountains up in Western Maine it’s gone forever. Sunday River went the VHS route in the early to mid-1980s and I think did DVDs of this eventually too, so striping and dubbing are a possibility here. There’s just something unwholesome about having a studio perfect soundtrack synced to film like this!

These are fairly common on the used film market. As a matter of fact I stopped myself from buying them once I found a really mint print on black and white stock. (Enough is enough!)

Mine is a fairly late print. Sunday River was printing everything on color stock by then. It was never really “black and white”, more a very deep burgundy and white. In the years since, I’ve gotten true black and white prints, and when I watch these days I use one of these.

-still the same, when I hung my wonderful, big new Daylight screen and opened up what became my present day screening room, the first print shown was that very first, now kind of reddish, “Two Foot Gauge in Maine”.

-Now honorably retired!

Posted by Alan Gouger (Member # 31) on April 08, 2016, 08:27 PM:

Steve as soon as I saw the title I knew it had to do with trains so your thread was my first stop tonight. I'm a rail fan as well and love the little narrow gage especially the 2 footers. I've seen plenty digest's on trains being offered but I never risked picking one up some reason but reading your review makes me want to revisit the hobby of film. Thanks for posting this, nice to see something a little different.

Posted by Paul Adsett (Member # 25) on April 09, 2016, 03:52 PM:

Wonderful, well written, story Steve!

.............and probably the longest film review ever posted on a film forum! [Big Grin]

Posted by Steve Klare (Member # 12) on April 09, 2016, 06:24 PM:

Thanks, Paul!

I guess making a film like this generally interesting required a great deal of context!

This story isn't entirely past-tense. From the fifties on forward a number of really good books were published about these lines. As a result, several of them have dedicated preservationists that are laying new track on the abandoned grades and restoring (or even recreating) original equipment and buildings. One of them recently restored an original steam locomotive that last saw steam in 1933.

I go up to visit as often as I can and have even gone a little "Albert G. Hale" myself!

Modern Times on The Wiscasset, Waterville and Farmington

-beware railroad films, Alan!

Mine have utterly destroyed me as a model railroader. They have a lot more presence 5 feet high on a movie screen than 2 inches tall down in the basement.

My poor family: a decent sized freight train from somewhere in the world pounds through the living room several times a month!

-my speakers do Beethoven...they do Burlington Northern too!

(Why couldn't I just like musicals?)

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