10/07/2026
There is a clearing deep in the Allagash Wilderness of northern Maine where two steam locomotives have been standing for nearly a century — rusting, silent, slowly swallowed by the forest. They call them the ghost trains. 🚂
In the winter of 1926 and 1927, Edouard Lacroix's Madawaska Company set out to do the impossible: build a standard-gauge railroad through a wilderness with no roads, no towns, and no connection to any other line on earth. Lombard log haulers dragged two massive steam locomotives, miles of steel rail, and sixty rail cars through the frozen north woods — over ice roads and across frozen lakes — to lay thirteen miles of track from Eagle Lake to Umbazooksus Lake. The prize: four-foot pulpwood bound for the Great Northern paper mill at Millinocket.
And it worked. For six years, the little Eagle Lake and West Branch Railroad carried nearly a million cords of pulpwood. Then the Great Depression arrived, and the work simply stopped. The two engines — an 1897 Schenectady 4-6-0 and a 1901 Brooks 2-8-0, both converted to burn oil — were too remote to rescue and too costly to haul out. They were parked in an engine shed, waiting for better days.
Those days never came. In 1969, the Maine Forest Service burned the shed by mistake, and the ghost trains have stood in the open ever since — stripped by souvenir hunters, softened by a century of weather, slowly reclaimed by the spruce.
Today they sit in the Tramway Historic District inside the Allagash Wilderness Waterway, the only two locomotives in any direction for over a hundred miles. No road reaches them. You get there by water — or not at all.
Would you make the journey to stand before them?
Note: historical scenes in this reel are AI reconstructions, not archival footage.
