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Is your favorite main line now full of weeds and wild flowers?
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Two lines come to mind: one from my childhood in Connecticut and the other from later years in Iowa. <br /> <br />I grew up in a small town just north of Bridgeport, Connecticut near what used to be the Pequonock River Valeyy line of the Housatonic Railroad. It ran from Bridgeport north through Trumbull, Monroe, Stepney and Newtown, where it linked up with what became the New Haven's "Maybrook Line". The line through my hometown was shut down and abandoned in the 1930, so when I first saw it in the 60's as a kid, it was just a path through the woods with the occasional stone cut or concrete abutment to remind you it once carried trains. I would have loved to see the old steam engines that once ran on the line. My elderly next door neighbor's father used to be the staion master at the Trumbull depot. <br /> <br />The second line was the former Rock Island Chicago to KC main that ran through Southeast Iowa and had a huge yard and division point at Eldon, Iowa. It was still running back in the mid to late 70's when I worked in nearby Ottumwa, which saw brancnh line trains runn from Eldon through Ottumwa and on up to Oskaloosa before that line too was abandoned and ripped up. I went back several years after the "Rock" (how funny) crumbled. It was all overgrown, but here and there you could still see a culvert or even an old signal post with broken flags or lenses that looked like it was left behind to signal "ghost trains". Always makes me kind of melancholy to remember those images.
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