Maine Central's Penobscot Street Spur

For reasons beyond my control, I no longer have the space to work on a medium sized layout like I had planned. Thus, my layout building efforts will probably be contained to a corner of my bedroom. I have decided, then to design and build a small switching layout.

Besides the space issues, I decided to work on a switching layout so that I would have a better chance of finishing a layout. None of my previous layouts have progressed passed the stage of tracklaying. I think that perhaps a smaller switching layout will make it so that I can finally get scenery finished. I also want to be able to try things like attaching a backdrop to my layout. 

So I got out my copy of Maine Central in Color Volume 3, and started to look for a suitable prototype to model on a small switching layout. I had three criteria for a prototype for the layout: first, it had to be of the Maine Central in the 50s, second, it had to be in Maine (meaning no mountain division), and it had to be small enough that I could model it without to much compression.

After looking through the book for a while, I came across the Penobscot Street spur in Brewer, Maine. This line ran along the Penobscot river for three blocks. The line split from the Maine Central's Calais branch near the railroad bridge across the Penobscot River from Bangor.

Courtesy University of New Hampshire Library

The topographic map above shows Brewer and Bangor in 1942. I circled the location of the Penobscot St. spur on the map. You can click on the map to make it bigger and see the location of the spur in greater detail. 

The spur served a lumberyard, a team track, and another small industry. I have been working on designing a trackplan based on the Penobscot St. spur, and I will post it and more details about the line tommorrow.