Headed South Link to full story and picture.http://www.villagesoup.com/Business/sto ... KenBELFAST (Dec 3, 2005): A large, heavy piece of Belfast history was loaded onto a trailer Thursday and hauled to Alabama.The turntable that for more than a century enabled Belfast & Moosehead Lake Railroad locomotives to get off the tracks and under cover for the night will be on display at a developing railroad museum in Tuscumbia, Ala.Scott Lindsay, who purchased the turntable for a buyer he wouldn't name, said plans are to reconstruct a roundhouse and the turntable at the museum, which will be built at a stop along the Tuscumbia and Decatur Railroad.The turntable is 60 feet long, he said, and weighs 30,000 pounds. Until it was removed from the former railroad yard last summer, it could balance a locomotive on its rails and be turned by a single person.Based in Belfast, Senior Reporter Jay Davis can be reached at 207-338-0484 or by e-mail at jdavis@villagesoup.com.

The saddest part of this is that Belfast is a gorgeous community on the Atlantic Ocean. The rail head location was right at the edge of the harbor and the trains, if properly cultivated, would have brought tourists and all manner of business to the town. Instead, local businesses refused a steam locomotive because of "the noise", the railroad fails to pay a piddling sum in taxes, the selectmen oust the namesake company from the town, and nobody gets anything except an abandoned yard braced on one side by the sewerage processing plant and some boat yards on the other. Belfast made a very bad series of choices in this, but they were easily goaded by the railroad. One the opposite end of the line, the Unity station needs serious work, the tracks are over crowded with old historical pieces and Swedish coaches, and the tracks look almost as bad as Guilford's main line. What a tragedy.

While it is good that the turntable will be reused and not scrapped, there is one part with this too-common scenario that bothers me. That is, we are losing real railroad history while creating imitation history elsewhere. Belfast is certainly not the first place this has happened.While the probability of returning the railroad yard to Belfast seems over and done with now, it seems prudent to examine in retrospect what might have been done to have kept it in place before the controversy started. Some sort of historic designation for the site, completed some years before, would have probably helped.Belfast was but a minor dot on the historic railroad map, but consider Sacramento's plan of about 20 years ago to expand into the mall-like MORT facility, while the historic SP shops nearby were obviously doomed for closure and probably demolition. Fortunately, the opposite happened, and the historic buildings should eventually become a visitable part of CSRM. But plenty of other historic RR sites have been lost with barely a whimper from our community. Some that have been saved have morphed into something they never were while in RR use. The few remaining sites that have potential for recreating the past as it once was seem to draw little interest among us.So then, going back ten years or so to Belfast, what would have been the best course to keep the historic railyard in place? This information, of course, being useful to prevent more losses in the future.

In the post above Richard mentions the coaches. What is the status of the steam locomotive? I forget, was it FRA cert?

Considering how close the Belfast turntable came to being scrapped this summer, I'm delighted that Scott found a buyer and saved it. It came within a whisker of becoming demolished. The Foundation did take care when removing it to make sure it wasn't ruined.On Belfast - you'd have to go back to the Bert Clifford era to understand how Unity, not Belfast, came to be where he made all the investment in the railroad. He was from Unity - his hometown, and spend the Unitel forture there. He had personal, not necessarily business, reasons for investing in his hometown, and they've even written a book about it. He was the ultimate 'hometown boy done good' for Unity. For whatever reason, Belfast and the Cliffords did not get along, to the extent that legal actions started way back then. There was little if any site improvement and maintenance done in Belfast from that time forward. You have to understand that relationship to understand what happened. The lack of maintenance at Belfast appears to have led to the resentment from the community over time, too, as portions became eyesores. The new shops, station, Swedish passenger equipment, etc. ... all happened at Unity. Because Unity isn't particularly on any natural tourist flows (like Rt. 1) it has made it more difficult to sustain ridership at that location.FYI, 1149 was up and running during the 2004 season with FRA certification. They were readying it for the 2005 season when the lease was cancelled. It's in much better shape that most stored steam out there.Looking back, it's painful, but the only reason that the B&ML lasted as long as it did after the freight business dried up was that Clifford invested a lot in it and kept it going - but mostly out of Unity. By the time the ownership changed over to the estate after Cliffords death, Belfast had largely been ignored, cut back, demolished, and was only a shadow of what it had been only five years previous. By 2005, there was so little remaining original fabric left and so much incursion from surrounding interests that the original seaport yard was largely gone anyway, and the real estate was valuable.It's unfortunate, but as it was a completely privately-owned, for-profit enterprise, I don't see how the 'rail preservation community' could have done much to shape the outcome here to preserve the Belfast site.

Of course, this wasn't always so. For most of its life, the B&ML was owned by Belfast and Unity. As I recall, Belfast owned 90% and Unity owned 10%. There was also a screwy preferred stock owned by many people. To my knowledge it had no voting power and never paid its promised dividends. As the freight business died the line was sold into private hands. Perhaps alternative freight business might have been created if it weren't owned by the towns. Didn't the BAR take away some B&ML business with its Searsport operation?We as preservationists can point out endangered sites and artifacts, but it is difficult to act without some minimal level of local support - like that which appears to be responding to MEC 470 in Bangor.

Well said, Randy. I can't help but put forth the idea that the freight decline came when the chicken processing plants collapsed and the poultry industry relocated in Ohio. That was a major portion of the B&ML's income. They hauled feed and grain up to Burnham off the Maine Central. Put two strikes against it there; Guilford was an unreliable tie in and the chickens had flown the coop! In Belfast, the freight house and original railroad building still stand, albeit as community theatre and other local business. Belfast could have been a nice little rail museum hub too, but locals complained about the steam locomotive noises (I don't get it either), and the rail yard looked like - a rail yard! In Unity, the whole thing is in a state of early entropy. They have an ex-B&M RDC and a few small vehicles. One or two 70 tonners run, but the steam loco is tied up in the shop with nothing to do. Unity is a non-descript town in central Maine and was a dumb place to invest the money. Nature is making the track a horror. I suspect we'll see an auction of property and equipment before too long. It's a real shame.