Bangor & Aroostook Railroad HO Scale Models

The Bangor and Aroostook Railroad was incorporated in 1891 through the consolidation of the Bangor and Piscataquis Railroad and the Bangor and Katahdin Iron Works Railway, with the intention of extending rail service into the remote and economically promising reaches of Aroostook County in northern Maine. Construction proceeded rapidly through the 1890s, with the main line reaching Oakfield and Houlton by 1894, pushing northward to Fort Fairfield, Caribou, and eventually Van Buren by 1899. Branch lines spread across the county through the early twentieth century, including an extension of the Ashland Branch to Fort Kent completed in 1902 and a southern outlet to tidewater at Searsport on Penobscot Bay, finished in 1905. An international bridge across the Saint John River between Van Buren and St. Leonard, New Brunswick, was completed in 1915, establishing interchange connections with the Canadian Pacific Railway and the National Transcontinental Railway, the latter of which was later absorbed into the Canadian National Railway. The railroad built its identity around two principal commodities. Potatoes were the first and most iconic, with the BAR beginning to haul them in heated boxcars as early as 1895. By the postwar years, potatoes accounted for roughly half of total revenue, and the railroad maintained one of the largest refrigerator car fleets in the United States, second only to the Santa Fe. A cooperative arrangement with Pacific Fruit Express allowed BAR reefers to carry California produce westbound during summer and autumn while PFE equipment handled Maine potato shipments in winter, making efficient use of both fleets. Paper and pulpwood eventually grew into a complementary revenue base, as mills along the Penobscot River at Millinocket and East Millinocket became major shippers from around 1900, and another mill opened at Madawaska in 1925. The railroad also served strategic military purposes, with the isolated port at Searsport handling ammunition shipments during World War II and the BAR hauling coal and aviation fuel to Loring Air Force Base throughout the Cold War era. The BAR drew widespread attention in the 1950s when it painted approximately 2,500 boxcars in a patriotic red, white, and blue scheme that made its equipment instantly recognizable across the national rail network. Passenger service, which had included named trains such as the Aroostook Flyer and the Potatoland running from Bangor north through the county to Van Buren and St. Francis, ended in 1961. The railroad's fortunes declined substantially through the 1960s and 1970s. A catastrophic failure of Penn Central interchange service during the winter of 1969 and 1970 caused a large portion of the potato crop to freeze in transit, destroying the trust of agricultural shippers who subsequently shifted permanently to truck transport. The Greenville branch, which had connected to Canadian Pacific trackage and provided a route to Quebec, was dismantled between 1962 and 1964, and several Aroostook County branch segments were abandoned as potato loadings vanished. In 1964, the BAR merged with the Punta Alegre Sugar and Railroad Company to form the conglomerate known as Bangor Punta. By 1995 the BAR had been acquired by Iron Road Railways, and the railroad declared bankruptcy in 2002. The following year its lines were sold to Rail World, which folded them into a newly created subsidiary called the Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway. The BAR's former territory was subsequently subdivided further over the following years: in 2010 the state of Maine purchased approximately 133 miles of track running from Millinocket north to the Canadian border for twenty million dollars, with Irving Oil's Maine Northern Railway taking over operations on that segment. The remaining southern portion of the former BAR, running from the Millinocket paper mills down to Searsport, stayed with Montreal, Maine and Atlantic until that carrier's own bankruptcy following its catastrophic 2013 Lac-Megantic derailment, after which it passed to the Fortress Investment Group as the Central Maine and Quebec Railway and was ultimately acquired by Canadian Pacific in 2019. The Bangor and Aroostook thus survives in fragmented form through successor operations, remembered as a tenacious regional carrier that shaped the economic and agricultural development of northern Maine for more than a century.