The Unassailable Allure of the Great Ghost Trains of Maine

Deep in the woods of northern Maine… (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

When you think of Maine, what images come to mind? Plates piled high with freshly-caught seafood? Lighthouses perched along rocky ocean shores? Stephen King holed up in his Victorian mansion in Bangor, cranking out his next masterpiece? Any of those would fit the bill, but let’s step away from the coast and the southern portion of the state, and head up north into the woods for a moment.

If you didn’t know, 90 percent of Maine is covered by forest, making it the most heavily-forested state in the entire U.S. And what is it we love about the woods? Oh right, they’re charming, poetic, mysterious places that often contain loads of secrets — both good kinds and bad — and the woods in northern Maine, which might as well be Canada, are no exception.

Hidden in the 17.5 million acres of forest spread across the state are a number of abandoned sites. These include vacant paper mills, deserted homes, old forts, and underground bunkers. But one of the most interesting things you’ll find in the woods of northern Maine are a pair of long-forgotten locomotive engines, rusting away in the middle of nowhere.

Maine’s “ghost trains”, as they have come to be called, are not easy to find. Buried deep within the North Maine Woods, the trains, which sit near Eagle Lake, can only be accessed by following a confusing network of dirt roads, which seemingly lead you further and further away from civilization.

They’re not completely off the grid, however. If you follow the directions provided by blogger Derrick Grant on Maine Passport, which get you to the ghost trains in 32 easy steps (lol), you’ll find you can nearly drive right to the clearing they occupy.

Grant, who visited the site in August 2022, tells you step by step how to make your way to a parking area that sits less than a mile from the locomotives. A walking trail that runs parallel to nearby Eagle Lake will take you the rest of the way, straight to the eeriest “train station” you may ever encounter.

The clearing with the two locomotives at its center is like a snapshot out of Alan Wake — which is to say, if you stayed past dark, you might get the sense you were walking around on the set of a real-life horror movie. Aside from the main attraction, old, rusted railroad equipment can be found littered all around the area, making it a sort of living museum. You can look and touch, but it’s probably a good idea to bring gloves, lest you slice your finger open on some sharp, rusty metal.

Now that we’ve handled the “what” and the “where”, let’s spend a little time on the “how” and the “why”, as in: how did all of this stuff end up here, and why was it left behind? For those answers, we have to travel all the way back to 1926. That’s the year a Canadian lumber baron by the name of Edouard “King” Lacroix began hauling materials to build a railroad deep in the woods of northern Maine for the purpose of transporting logs from the areas surrounding Churchill and Eagle lakes down to the Penobscot River.

Before the railroad went into operation, however, the Great Northern Paper Company bought Lacroix out. Shortly after, Great Northern oversaw the first successful trip of what they deemed the Eagle Lake & West Branch Railroad on June 1, 1927.

Over the next six years, the railroad transported nearly a million cords of pulpwood, but as paper demand dropped amid the Great Recession, the railroad ultimately shuttered in 1933. According to Maine’s Department of Agriculture, Conservation & Forestry, the pair of 100-ton locomotives that drove the whole operation were left behind because they were “relatively obsolete” and “not worth the cost of transporting” out of the remote wilderness. The trains were left inside the engine house, which subsequently burned down in 1969, leaving them exposed to the elements.

Over the years, visitors to the site, which became a popular attraction for snowmobilers, pilfered all kinds of souvenirs from the locomotives, such as gauges, bells, and number plates. By the ‘90s, only the shells of the once-great behemoths remained, a rusting reminder of an industrial age long gone by, but one that you can visit still today — as long as you’re willing to take a hike.

-LTH