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Robert Klose lives and writes in Orono. His latest book is “Trigger Warning.”
Bangor once hosted a sleek, stainless steel, diesel-electric passenger train called the Flying Yankee. She was elegant and futuristic, and she was fast, covering the distance to Boston in less than four-and-a-half hours.
Hard to believe this train debuted back in 1935 — almost a hundred years ago. It was the depth of the Depression, when money was tight and the unemployment rate was 20%. Tough times, but they didn’t serve as excuses for neglecting municipal infrastructure.
The Flying Yankee was an investment in something we rarely hear spoken of in our age of big money and personal gain — social capital. The Flying Yankee was a grace, and a convenience, and a gesture that communities mattered, that people mattered, and that they deserved to be able to travel efficiently and in comfort.
The Flying Yankee Streamliner was jointly operated by the Boston and Maine Railroad and the Central Maine Railroad. It was one of the fastest trains in America and clocked almost 3 million miles by the time it was retired in 1957, dying just as heavy machinery was excavating the landscape for the burgeoning interstate highway system.
The message from the government was clear: You want to go someplace? Then get in your car and drive.
America used to have a railway system that was the envy of the world: a combination of long-distance trains, streetcars and interurban light rail. Almost overnight, we scrapped it, replacing rails with blacktop, and the more we extended and widened our highways, the greater the congestion became. What looked like the future of transportation to some was seen as madness to others.
I recall a comment John Steinbeck made in his 1962 book, “Travels With Charley”: “I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.” He wrote this during the fevered days of “urban renewal,” whose motto essentially was “out with the old, in with the new!” Bangor made its own contribution to the destruction by demolishing its Romanesque revival Union Station, replacing it with the soul-numbing dyspepsia of a strip mall.
During my walks through downtown Bangor, I have often imagined — or reimagined — how the cityscape would change with the advent of a train, and, throughout the day, the periodic disgorgement of its passenger load. Unlike a bus, which lumbers into a city like a thief in the night, the arrival of a train is an event. Further, traveling by train is unique: in a car or a bus, one’s mind is focused on the destination; in a train, the focus is drawn to the experience.
I recently took a train ride from Rockland to Waldoboro, sponsored by the Maine Rail Group, a passenger-rail advocacy organization. In many locations along the way, the tracks went where there were no visible roads. Traveling through the woods and over waterways, I couldn’t help considering how fortunate I was to not be driving and to be seeing landscapes hidden from denizens of motor vehicles jockeying with one another on the highways.
Maine’s principal cities are laid out from north to south along existing rails. From Bangor to Waterville to Augusta to Brunswick and Portland, the path is already there for the return of passenger rail. I would never drive to Augusta unless I had business there, but I would make a day trip to Augusta on a train. For the experience. For its being divorced from the highways. For the vistas it would afford me.
We had this figured out in 1935. Bringing back the Flying Yankee would be a distinction for Maine, a return to the future.
This is not as far-fetched as naysayers might suggest. The Flying Yankee was salvaged and is presently being rebuilt and refurbished at the Conway Scenic Railroad in New Hampshire. The goal is to return it to running condition. Go to flyingyankee.org for details. Then close your eyes and imagine the old girl slipping into Bangor. Wonders never cease.