Does Maine still ship potatoes?

I've heard that story too, Ridgefielder. I bet there's probably a magazine article on it.

Angier and Cleaves' book, "Bangor and Aroostook" references the "potato caretakers" (nicknamed "potato bugs") tending wood stoves and later charcoal stoves in the days before insulated cars. Sounds like they were phased out in the late 20s.

This is an interesting topic.....well my two cents comes from stories told to me in far off Maine huning camps. Taters was a part of most northern Mainers lifes. I remember one older gent saying you could ship taters without heat but you could not stop if you did. I asked why and he told me it was the friction of the taters rubbing against each other that kept them from freezing. Maybe that's why trucking became so popular? So much for the rail related part...Into the 80's (and may be now) the schools would scheduale the school year based on the harvest time of the taters. For weeks the schools would close in sept and Oct while the crop was brought in. As a kid I was envious of kids my age, 12 or so, driving around (as I was from Southern Maine and came up to support the bear hunting... that's another story) in anything that could haul. It didn't have to haul taters....just haul. There were people to move and people to feed. Parts, fuel, it was like ants...State drivers lic were available to kids starting at 12 but you had to live in "The County".There was some big farm equipment, but alot of it was done by old machines behind a regular tractor. People rode these things and sorted as they rode. So people wonder why "The County" has had it so bad for so long...everything was taters. Logging was not really a big thing in "The County". That was more to the south and west. Sorry....way away from topic but fun to think about

Last I heard schools in The County still take a special three week vacation during the potato harvest.

Presque Isle High School (Maine School Administrative District 1) will take the 'Harvest Break' from Sep. 21 - Oct. 9 this fall.
http://www.sad1.org/calendar-9-12.pdf

They start school earlier to compensate.

I just woke up and am in a hot room so excuse me.


Potatoes ??


Just curious about the potato industry there.


Was there not some issue with over the border the Canadian potatoes were less expensive and this put a big dent into Maine potato farming ??


-- but -- now..the Canadian Dollar worth more than the US Dollar ?


Not one potato chip manufacturer left ? Humpty Dumpty bought by a Quebec outfit a decade or so ago and that brand essentially gone. (all made in Quebec now) I believe Shaws grocery store chain used Humpty Dumpty as their private label though.

Potatoes here (Connecticut) were cheap at times of the year. A couple of years ago a 10 pound bag for 99 cents at times ? Now ? grrrr The price has skyrocketed.


I hope this post is not too un-rail related.

Yes, the Maine potato industry is alive and well up north. Just not like it used to be and they don't ship by rail anymore unfortunately.

The RMNE has a former Bangor & Aroostook potato car 2569, built in 1953, This car was DONATED by the BAR c.1985. It is an insulated box car, not a reefer with ice bunkers, but it was equipped with a charcoal stove which came along with the car IIRC. It awaits restoration at Waterville on the RMNE's Naugatuck RR.

trainsinmaine wrote:The heart of the Maine egg industry is Turner, near Lewiston. There is no rail line in Turner. If feed is shipped by rail, I would presume it could come as far as Auburn or Leeds and is trucked from there.

Looking back through the thread I was wondering if anyone had yet established firm date for when the BAR abandoned shipping potatoes. I couldn't find any but I did catch this quick note about eggs. DeCoster egg farm is located on the Rumford Branch in Turner, it is one of the most active non-paper related rail customers that PAR has in Maine.

So the questions stands when did BAR abandon potato shipping? We all know it happened but the question is when and what were the circumstances, does the mythical PennCentral 'lost season' of potatoes really exist as mentioned in a previous post, and is it related to the BAR ending potato shipping?

I've always read with much interest BAR's history with the potatoe traffic. BAR hauled just under 13,000 cars of spuds in 1968, which by the way, was the same year the I-95 was completed to Houlton, Me. However over the next decade, that traffic certainly went into a freefall. After handling only 19 cars in 1979, BAR offered various incentives to shippers, but to no avail, soon severing ties with the potatoe business thereafter.

Even in 1964, The Bangor and Aroostook carried 24,000 carloads of pototoes. It has been said that despite severe truck competition as the I-95 was advanced into Northern Maine, The Penn Central was the entity that dealt the final blow to the potatoe traffic..........no matter how quick BAR, MEC and the Boston & Maine shipped the spuds to Boston, the Penn Central, being near bankruptcy, incurred numerous traffic delays, resulting in spoilage.

After various incentives offered to potatoe shippers by BAR, followed by minor response, the railroad decided to retire its entire 794 reefer fleet in August 1979.

Far be it from me to try to get into the head of anybody from PC (Hi, Dave Fink the Elder!), but additional factors in the disappearance of Maine RR potato traffic might have been at play:

-NH was forced on PC and there may have been more than a little PRR-NYC resentment at the shotgun adoption, despite continued cooperation between NH and PRR and, at least for the stretch into GCT, between NH and NYC.

-NH had Maine potato cars just like BAR, but as far as New York consumers went, was up against the potato fields on Long Island (Hi, Yaz's dad!).

-Back in the era of "standing derailments," PC might have wanted to reduce track-stressing traffic, especially in winter, from relatively low-income commodities. Coal in its totality was high-income and poltically required.

-Maine potatoes started having some pretty important QA issues, and Idaho was getting increasingly aggressive in its nation-wide marketing and distribution.

On the trivia front, back more than a bit, PRR and BAR had power-leasing arrangements. Some BAR power would summer on Pennsy. Some of BAR's steam power even looked a bit Pennsyish: no Belpaire boilers, but high-mounted headlights and horizontally-slatted pilots.