During the summer solstice, swimmers reveled in the cold water under the The West Dummerston Covered Bridge in Dummerston, Vt. and Sunday drivers stopped for late season strawberries at Dutton Berry Farm.
Up the road, a faded menu was posted on the porch of the white colonial Newfane Inn, where diners had ordered goose liver pate with crispy roast duckling and souffle glace.
There’s not much beyond Newfane, Vt. except farmstands and flea markets, but across from the Inn is the West River Railroad Museum — a hidden gem.
The first steam engine rolled through Newfane in 1885, the middle stop on a 10-stop “short line” between Brattleboro and South Londonderry. Along this route, granite, wood, cattle, apples and yes, even commuters were transported.
The trains hauled “A little bit of everything,” said Larry Robinson, a tour guide and retired Windham County clerk of courts. “The passengers would get out and help load. It did a lot of good for the people up and down the valley. Without it, South Londonderry to Brattleboro was two days by horse.”
The depot was purchased for $160,000 and took two years to refurbish. “The previous owners planned to live here in the winter so they wouldn’t have to go up the hill,” said Robinson, “but the husband died and the project ended. We bought it from their kids for $40,000. This was all gutted, and we had to figure what it had looked like and how to put it all together.”
About 200 people attended the opening ceremony. “We invited politicians, but none of them came,” Robinson chuckled.
Volunteers laid a portion of track in front of the depot, and more ties and rails are stacked down near the 1,000-gallon water tank. “Original rails,” said Robinson. “We found some here and a fellow called us with 200 more feet of rail. We want to get from here down to the tank.”
The artifacts include a teletype and “stick” telephone the station master used, railroad maps and black-and-white photos, a scale to weigh produce, a mail cart, and a long hammer with a narrow head that was used to drive spikes.
Visitors can sit on the same benches that passengers used to wait for their rides. The engines could reach 40 mph but falling boulders and snow drifts needed to be cleared, and floods washed away portions of track and caused delays and derailments. Locals called it “36 miles of trouble.”
Robinson gave me a copy of station master JJ Green’s diary from 1885. “This has been a keen cold day,” he wrote. “The mercury this morning stood at 16 below zero. Pretty savage for the 13 of March.”
Another entry from a few months later: “A rainy morning. Business dull. We have a new article of freight this morning in the shape of bailed hay.”
The following summer Green was returning on the train from Brattleboro when the tressle collapsed and the locomotive plunged into the river. Green, who was riding up front, and the engineer were both killed. “Some say the train was going too fast,” said Robinson. “They’re still fishing parts out of the river.”
The railroad went belly-up in 1936, done in by roads that were now connecting Brattleboro to the hinterlands. “The 1927 flood washed out a lot of track and it was hard putting it back together, and the railroad was competing with trucks for commerce.”
Most but not all of the old railroad bed has been converted into a cycling and jogging trail that’s maintained by the Friends of the West River Trail. I parked at a trailhead on Rice Farm Road in Dummerston and jogged a few miles next to the river. It has a slight grade and is mostly shaded, with several paths wending down to the river for swimming and fishing.
The museum is open weekends through Columbus Day from noon to 5 p.m., and admission is free. Most visitors are local, but the guest book shows signature from tourists as far away as Sarasota and Hyde Park.
“If somebody’s coming through they can call or email us,” said Robinson. “We’ll meet them here.”
Show up early, the trains run on time.
Chip Ainsworth is a freelance writer whose Keeping Score column is a regular feature on the Greenfield Recorder’s Saturday sports page.