Western Maine
50
The Gulf Stream Trestle by Charles Francis
A Maine engineering wonder
I
t was late in the afternoon when an inspector for the Somerset Railroad spied the rope dangling from a support timber of a step on the Gulf Stream Trestle. It was a shiny rope that looked as if it had been recently purchased. It swayed in the wind that almost always blew through the deep Gulf Stream Gorge. The end of the rope was rough and frayed. Then he noticed a neatly folded coat lying in the shadow of the track. Looking down into the depths below the spidery, steel legs of the trestle, the inspector was just able to make out the twisted shape of a figure next to one of the concrete piers. Had the Gulf Stream Trestle taken a life? Not bothering to attempt a descent from the trestle,
the inspector jumped onto his handcar and hightailed it as fast as he could go to the nearest doctor. When the doctor and his nurse reached the bottom of the gorge, they found a lumberjack gasping out his last breath. A length of rope was around his neck. The Gulf Stream Trestle had seen its only suicide. The Gulf Stream Trestle on the Kineo Branch of the Somerset Railroad was one of the great wonders of the Maine north woods. Spanning a distance of seven hundred feet over the one hundred and twenty-five-foot deep Gulf Stream Gorge, it allowed the railroad to carry tourists in luxurious Pullman cars through one of the wildest and most inaccessible sections of Maine.
The Kineo branch of the Somerset Railroad had been built primarily to carry summer visitors to Kineo Station at Rockwood, where they transferred to the boats of the fabulous Kineo House on Mount Kineo for a vacation. The Somerset Railroad was the creation of John and William Ayer, father and son respectively. Chartered in 1860, the Somerset was to link the farms and mills of the upper Kennebec Valley to the railway terminus at Waterville. As originally conceived, it was to pass into the hands of the Maine Central Railroad, which purchased fifty thousand dollars worth of Somerset stock in 1868. This did not happen, however, until 1907. This was due, in part, to the
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