08/22/2026
Good morning everyone!
One of the questions we often get asked is what was the purpose of the B&SR and what goods did it carry? Some older documentaries and local folklore would say it was for passenger service primarily and some timber freight which isn't quite an honest reflection or review of the railroads service to the towns along it's 21 mile length nor how the various industrial interests of Bridgton demanded it be built. This idea of the B&SR being just a passenger line is fairly pervasive and we invite you to follow along in this post as we deep dive into some earlier company ledgers of the B&SR.
For a look into the traffic mix of the B&SR we will take a close look at the 1903 ledgers for the company which have the following statistics:
27,000 tons of freight were carried along with 21,600 passengers during the fiscal year.
To further break down the freight tonnage we will sort it into categories and give some tonnage examples:
Fuel oil: In 1901 The Standard Oil Company of New York (SOCONY) built an 11,280 gallon heating and fuel oil tank farm next to the railyard. Howard Burnham would be the local SOCONY agent until the 1930's when he bought the tanks for himself. Rail shipment of oil would begin in 1901 and pick up in 1902 with a single tank car in service, the second tank car would follow in years to come. The B&SR and B&H was the only Maine two-footer to have tank cars in service.
Coal: 9,000 tons brought in annually, 2,200 tons for Pondicherry Mill alone, an additional 1,200 tons were consumed by other local mills, 1,000 tons by the railroad, and the rest went to local homes and businesses for heating.
Produce: During the fall hundreds of tons of apples would leave the Bridgton orchards bound largely for the UK, during the peak of this trade 80% of apples exported along the B&SR were bound for the United Kingdom. Further canned corn and other vegetables from the two canning factories in Bridgton and Harrison made for a busy fall season.
Livestock: The railroad had two dedicated livestock cars by this point in time, both to get animals to fairs across the state but to import new ones into the area. Cattle, horses, mules, chickens, ducks, and geese were moved by the road to various farm and homesteads along the line.
Wool and textiles: eight hundred tons of fresh and shoddy wool were brought in during 1902 to feed the Pondicherry, Forest, and Cumberland (later Gibb's) Mills along with all of the required dyes and machine tooling replacements. Hundreds of tons of raw hides would arrive to the Bridgton tannery, and finished wool and leather bolts and products left as they arrived.
Finished products: Chairs from the mill in Harrison, sawn and finished lumber, baseball bats, and wooden dowels comprised the wooden finished products. While machinery such as industrial planers, bolters for sifting flower, and sawmill blades / linkages, iron plows and castings made by the Ricker Machine Company all left town on the two footer.
That is not to knock the excellent passenger service operated by the railroad for most of it's life. The B&SR prided itself on excellent passenger service and by the dying days of the narrow gauge the B&H fan-trips, where steam power was most common, etched into the memory of those who remember Bridgton's little road. That memory of the camp trains and railfan trips especially by the early authors, observers and preservationists of the two-footers helped propagate the idea that the B&SR was largely a passenger driven road from it's offset. Which considering how much the struggling B&H depended on those passenger revenues, as the Great Depression had thoroughly reduced the once vibrant mill scene in Bridgton to a ghost town, is a reasonable assumption to make.
It however, as seen above does not hold up to scrutiny of the companies early records and the politics surrounding it's foundation. Where local mill interests demanded better and faster connections to markets than the canal and steamboat systems could provide. The added benefit of the railroad, causing a tourism boom in an already popular vacation destination was just an additional benefit of the line, not the principle reason for it's construction.
We hope you enjoyed this deep dive into Bridgton's railroading past
