Turntable at Jewett, Maine

Can anyone tell me (roughly) where the location of the former turntable of the Conway Branch is, at Jewett ME? It's just a "pit" now, but, it's still there.

Jewett Maine is where the original Conway Branch (The Portsmouth, Great Falls and Conway RR) once had a junction with the Eastern RR. I've looked on some satellite views and cannot locate (or recognize) the junction point, or the "pit".

Any leads will be appreciated, thanks. (Street names, street intersections, etc).

-John K.

The pit,and a nice historical marker are at the intersection of Route 236 and Fife Road. Coming from Kittery on Rt. 236,it will be on your left,nearer S. Berwick than Kittery/Eliot.

Rt. 236 IS,from just outside Kittery the Old Eastern Right of Way. At Jewett,where the turntable pit is,Rt. 236 becomes the former Conway Branch,and you can see the "old Eastern mainline",swing to your right with powerlines and an underground Natural Gas pipeline "under it".

Be sure to park on Fife Rd. and look at pit and marker and try to visualize it a century ago! A great deal of rail and trolley history in that small area of Maine & N.H-if ya know where to look,and its best seen when the leaves/weeds are dead in late fall/early spring.

Hope this helps,

Bud

Until now I forgot that the Conway branch went all the way down to Portsmouth; are the tracks to the Conway branch still in place between Dover and Portsmouth? When was this part of the Conway branch abandoned? When the Boston and Maine ran trains up and down the Conway branch to and from Boston did most of them go through Portsmouth or did they take the short cut and take the current route that still exists and used by NHN?

Can't answer all those questions, except the last. Trains for North Conway went via Reading/Dover.

Per Robert M. Lindsell's book, with the creativity that seems to have been typical of the 19th century railroad entrepreneurs, the route from Portsmouth to Dover opened in 1874 as the (ta-da) Portsmouth & Dover. The Newington to Dover Point bridge was abandoned in 1934 and, with the route broken, service south of Dover extended only about 0.6 mi south to a mill. North from Portsmouth, tracks remain active (sorta) to Newington. In fact, a GP-9 and a string of tank cars made me late for work one morning.

The North Conway trains ran via the Western Route, as noted. In fact, R.M. Neal's High Green and the Bark Peelers notes an occasion when the engineer forgot a holiday stop in Reading, Massachusetts.

PBM