gokeefe wrote:I've been thinking about any possible mileage in Maine that should be included for consideration in this thread. And frankly I am happy to report that I can't imagine a single mile anywhere in Maine that has been lost and which would or should be considered as a vital connection. So many of the Right of Ways in Maine are preserved as snow-mobile trails that mile after mile of old branch lines are still very much intact. I guess I shouldn't be surprised given that this is also the same state where the old Eagle Lake & West Branch Railroad steam engines have been preserved in place deep in the Maine wilderness.
I think there could be some debate about the Union Branch in Portland or the Commerical Street running tracks (if they ever connected with the GT, which I don't think they did). But both of those lines have little justification for any future existence beyond general "pie in the sky" proposals that I think wouldn't be justified at the moment or perhaps ever.
Perhaps the real answer to this question for Maine is the double tracking of the Western Route between Portland and Plaistow/Boston. That was a major loss that is going to be very expensive to rebuild. Furthermore I think it is a virtual certainty that it will be necessary to rebuild all or major portions of it in the future if passenger service to/from Maine continues to expand.
Any Union Branch proposals would only recycle the first 3000 ft. from the junction that still has tracks in the ground. Any time it's been talked up recently it's been in tandem with that I-295 add-a-lane project, where they'd simply grab the rail line off its alignment at Exit 6A and bolt it to the side of the widened highway the rest of the way and slip it around every to-be-widened bridge. With none of the rest of the old alignment used at all. Then shiv in a junction by the sewage plant to connect to the waterfront trackage severed by the burnt-out swing bridge, cross Back Cove still bolted to 295 on its widened bridge as replacement for the swing, then hook onto the Baked Beans tracks out to Yarmouth Jct. Can't really consider that an "abandonment/restoration" since an entire 1.2 miles of it is new ROW created out of thin air and paid for by that big honking highway project they periodically salivate about doing. And its probability is 0.0% until MEDOT rustles up the will to do put design-build into motion on that Interstate widening megaproject. Then *maybe* the bolt-on has enough economy of scale for "why not both?", since the 295 nuke/rebuild of bridge and ramp structures more or less serves up the potential ROW if the space provision is baked into the highway design.
Quite the long list of prerequisites, if's, and but's...but yes, if they get hot to widen 295 it enters the conversation and gets a due diligence study.
Other than that...no, very few essentials. Probably because of all the bonkers route duplication around Portland, Lewiston, and Augusta, and most of the branchlines being non-connecting stubs to long-gone mills. Maybe the missing center section of that 'loop' branch around western Portland between the Mountain Industrial @ Sappi/Westbrook and Deering Jct. that was severed by I-95 in the Exit 48 vicinity makes for a decent pingback for a local or means of avoiding all the mainline grade crossings during a particularly ugly rush hour. But that seems like a dead-bottom priority luxury and surplus-to-requirement nobody's asking for.