• Waterville Station Plans/Pictures Required for Digital Model/Recreation

  • Discussion relating to the pre-1983 B&M and MEC railroads. For current operations, please see the Pan Am Railways Forum.
Discussion relating to the pre-1983 B&M and MEC railroads. For current operations, please see the Pan Am Railways Forum.

Moderator: MEC407

  by PViolette
 
I am working on a digital recreation of the station in Waterville and am looking for any plans/pictures of it that are not easily available online.

While pictures of the station at a distance definitely help ( I am missing some angles that I am making educated guesses on), interior photos and photos that show window/door frames, light fixtures, etc. are the biggest help. These would probably be personal photos of someone standing on the platform with the object behind them. I currently only have one photo of the interior, and the rest is going to be an educated guess based on period publications and other stations.

To date, I have contacted:
  • Maine Historic Preservation Commission (had some drawings, no detail sheets and some early pictures)
  • Maine Historical Society and all Minerva libraries (nothing)
  • State Archives (nothing)
  • Waterville Historical Society (nothing)
  • Waterville's city documents (nothing)
  • Boston and Maine Historical Society (a couple photos in the digitized collection, maybe more in the archive)
  • Kennebec Historical Society (nothing)
  • Historic New England (nothing)
Since the picture below, I have cut out and placed the windows on the 1st floor. Next will be designing the windows for the second & third, finalizing the dormers, the decorative brickwork, platform and awnings, signals, tracks, the small wooden passenger shelter on the north side, then the interior. My ultimate goal is to be able to see the station in AR in Waterville at its former location, and VR at home. May be interested in 3D printing for models, but we will see how this goes.

For those interested in Waterville history, I’m hoping to get enough info to do this entire area prior to the underpass. That specifically includes railroad square, Colby, and the Jefferson.

Image
  by jbvb
 
Is there any place with old Waterville newspapers, or microfiche thereof? If so, a quick first pass would be scanning the weeks when trains were added or taken off, when the Flying Yankee streamliner made its first and last runs, when celebrities are known to have visited Waterville etc.
  by PViolette
 
That's a good suggestion. Colby College has microfilms of the entirety of the "Morning Sentinel". If I decide to do an article, that is what I will do. Unfortunately the quality of newspaper photos are no where near what I would need to discern the details I am looking for. To add insult to injury, "Morning Sentinel" has disposed of all their negatives prior to 1948, so it reduces it some, but still have 13 years worth of potential photos.
  by markhb
 
historicaerials.com has aerial views of the area from 1956. You can't see the details of the facades but it'll give you a broad view of the area.