The early days of railroading in southern Maine

Came across this in today's York County Coast Star newspaper. If you've ever wondered about the early years of railroading in southern Maine, you'll enjoy this:

http://www.seacoastonline.com/articles/ ... FE-9160338

That is a great article ! I particularly liked these sentences at the end regarding the fear by coastal residents that the railroad would "poison" the land for miles on both sides of it's ROW-
"Their fear had been replaced by visions of Boston dollars arriving by train every summer. Mr. Hatch and his like-minded neighbors, still living at Highpine, didn't mind either."
hahaha!!!

One point that isn't mentioned in the article was that early on, Maine had a law forbidding the building of railroads less than 100 feet above sea level, with some exception scheme for places that wanted service and had more clout than the coastal shipping industry (e.g. Portland, Biddeford/Saco, Kittery etc.). This was one reason the P,S&P was routed far inland, away from most of the intermediate population.

I read this in the original, pre-WWI histories of the Maine railroads, which the somewhat stodgy Newburyport Public Library hadn't yet purged as of about 1970. Alas, this fact didn't make it into "Steelways of New England" and I haven't a clue where you'd go to get most of the books it mentions in its bibliography.