Half-Z Scale - 1:440 Tiny Trains and even 1:900 Tiniest Trains!
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MARION RIVER CARRY RAILROAD
MARION RIVER CARRY RAILROAD
HOME PAGE
{unofficial}
Photo courtesy of the Adirondack Museum
H. K. PORTER 0-4-0T LOCOMOTIVE No. 2 ON DISPLAY AT THE
ADIRONDACK MUSEUM,
BLUE MOUNTAIN LAKE, NEW YORK
This is one fantastic museum and well worth a trip to the heart of the
Adirondacks!
The Marion River Carry Railroad may well have been the shortest standard-gauge
passenger line in history and certainly had one of the smallest standard-gauge steam
locomotives built in the 20th Century. The Marion River is one of the waterways
in the Fulton Chain of Lakes system running diagonally east-northeast in New York
State's Adirondack Mountains from near Utica through Raquette Lake to Blue Mountain
Lake (the Eckford Lakes). Extended culturally, if not strictly hydrologically, Long
Lake, Tupper Lake, Saranac Lake, and Lake Placid to the northeast and Indian Lake
to the southeast can be included.
MapQuest map of area of the Marion River Carry.
You can zoom down and scroll for more detail or zoom up to see where in the world
Raquette Lake and the Marion River are. The "river" parallels Route 28 to the
west, emptying into Raquette Lake between Wood's (or Osprey) Point and Long Point,
and that is Utowana Lake to the east. As far as I can recall, the small road (dirt
trail in 1980) runs north from Route 28, by a lovely little restaurant, across a meadow
where the Carry Hotel was (and what was that building may still be) and then
northwest to the right-of-way about where the train shed was (there was in 1980,
and may still be, the impression of the inspection pit that still lay between the rails
inside the shed as late as 1948 and was since filled in, still visible on the ground).
The right-of-way continued west to the rotted remains of the dock on the Marion River
and following it east from the shed brings you to the western shore of Utowana Lake,
which feeds through a small neck directly into Eagle Lake and thence to Blue Mountain
Lake. If you are up that way, be sure to visit the Museum! {I will have
to find my Geodetic Survey map of the area and some old reference works before this i
nformation can be nailed down with more certainty.}
If you prefer Excite's maps, try
theirs.
For additional reference, I redrew the Michael Kudish maps of 1996 and in Allen, et al.
of 1999:
(Map redrawn 27 Jul 2005 after Michael Kudish, 1996, and in Allen, et al. 1999 - all rights reserved)
[Thumbnailed image, click on diagram for larger image.]
adding the buildings, the roads, and other details.
Kudish locates the road in to the outlet of Utowana Lake as half way between the
Raquette Lake village road, opposite Sagamore Road, (6.7 miles) and the intersection
of 28 and 30 in Blue Mountain Lake village (6.4) miles and the road to the inn as 2.5
miles form Golden Beach Campground and 6.4 miles from the Raquette/Sagamore
Roads.
If anyone can locate the station, restaurant, inn, and enginehouse with
ABSOLUTE certainty, I'll put them in more accurately.
[However, there is more to this than meets the eye, so see
continuation page 1.]
Here's a fantastic coincidence! I am not a postcard collector but I went to a
local postcard show on 02 May 2002 to meet a friend (who didn't turn up) and, while
waiting, poked around and found this gem in a miscellaneous pile for a VERY
reasonable price and snapped it up:
(From the collection of S. Berliner, III - all rights reserved)
[Thumbnailed image, click on picture for larger image.]
What we have here is a very slight crop from the post card, which has absolutely no
identifying markings of any sort, but which is neatly hand-lettered on the reverse:
"Trip from Fourth Lake
July, 1928"
What a find! All three horsecars show, although the third one only barely.
Look at the shape of the roof on the first one! They look more like gypsy
caravans than passenger cars.
- 18 May 02 - looking at that odd first
horsecar, it occurred to me that I definitely had NOT seen that car
in the shed, at least certainly not up against the loco nor at the tail end; the car
directly behind the loco had transverse seats, as did the one behind that one.
I am absolutely certain of this; there were at least two cars in with the loco
and both end ones had transverse seats. I don't recall a third car (first on the
postcard), with longitudinal seating, in the shed after WWII. We know for a
fact that the last car in the shed was one of the "normal" two because of the 1948
photos (below) of letter carrier Dave sprawled across the back seat and of me
standing there.
In addition, it occurred to me (20 May 02) that I do not remember anything blocking
my view from front to back (and I was an attendant, good, big brother) and the front
end of that odd car certainly would have done that! Even more to the point,
since I wasn't up on the back of the loco cab (there was no coal bunker#),
how could I have taken the picture of my sister (left, below) if that car had been
between the cab and where I stood?
# - Incidentally, that Porter had no coal bunker; it was fueled at each end of the
exceedingly-short line and carried small piles for emergency replenishment in the
corners on the floorplate at the back wall of the cab.
(maybe) - I got word that an effort is underway to restore the Marion River Carry
Railroad, with a Master Plan and all. It's true; an application is before the
Adirondacks Park Agency.
I was back up to Raquette and Blue Mountain Lakes and the Adirondack Museum on
26 Jun 02 on my way down from Québec and Montréal; watch for more photos.
The RoW of the MRCRR was blocked and posted! I was also up on 07-08 Aug
05; much more to add.
History of the Marion River Carry Railroad:
With the development of tourism in the area before the turn of the 20th Century,
railroads were pushed into the virgin timberlands. The NYC, D&H, and others
encroached into the Adirondack wilderness. At the head of rail, small steamers
ferried passengers across lakes to carries (portages) where horse and wagons
awaited. Between Raquette Lake and Blue Mountain Lake, however, the
Marion River (barely more than a stream) allowed steamers to penetrate several miles
eastward to a ¾-mile¹ carry (originally Bassett's Carry) between the River and
Utowana Lake. Once across the carry, steamers continued through Utowana
and Eagle Lakes to Blue Mountain Lake. In the summer of 1899, William West
Durant, President of the Adirondack Railroad, built a ¾-mile railroad¹ on the carry
and shipped in three surplus Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company open horse-drawn
streetcars, one for baggage and two capable of carrying a total of 125 passengers
on a single run. Durant paid $25 apiece for the cars! A horse pulled one
car until May, 1900. A small wood-burning steam locomotive was purchased
and converted to oil service at the Schenectady Locomotive Works (later
ALCo); it was delivered by rail to the station at Raquette Lake in May of 1900 but
proved inadequate for the load and a New York Central engine was rented for $5 per
day. That engine was too heavy for the roadbed and, in 1900@,
the H. K. Porter Company of Pittsburgh built a diminutive locomotive, patterned after
those used on New York City's elevated lines, to pull these cars. This third
engine, Number 2, was placed in service in August of 1901, and remained on active
duty until September 15, 1929. On October 2, 1929, a Mr. Covey, Master
Mechanic of the Raquette Lake Transportation Company, put the engine and one or
more cars in the engine shed which sat alongside the line near its lower (western) end,
near the former Carry Inn (there is a question as to how many cars - the author
remembers at least the two passenger cars for certain, and possibly all three, being in
the shed in the mid-to-late '40s). The rails remained in place until scrapped to
supply Japanese demands for steel in 1939. In 1955, No. 2 and the sole
remaining car and remnants of the other two were moved to the Adirondack Museum
at Blue Mountain Lake, the locomotive cosmetically restored and a single passenger
car created from the remains of the one car and parts from the other two cars; they
are on view at the museum now. The author was somewhat shocked on first
visiting the Museum to find his childhood "playtoys" on view.
¹ - ¾ of a mile is an approximation; 1,300 yards (3,900 feet or 1188.7m)
is closer to accurate.&bsp; That comes out to 44' 9¼" in HO scale
(1:87.1), 24' 4½" in N (1:160), and 17' 8¾" in Z (1:220 - where
24' = 1 mile) - however, Kudish (1996) shows it as 0.87 miles (4,593' 7") {???}.
@ - Porter may have started #2 in 1900 but it's builder's plate clearly shows it as
having been built in 1901, as No. 2396:
(cropped from 08 Aug 2005 photo by and © 2005 S. Berliner, III - all rights reserved)
{Long-promised picture of}
AUTHOR'S SISTER "AT THE THROTTLE" OF H. K. PORTER 0-4-0T
LOCOMOTIVE No. 2 IN ENGINE SHED ON THE
CARRY AT RAQUETTE LAKE, NEW YORK,
Summer 1948 (view looking east from front of first horsecar)
and now with two same-day shots of the author (the nerdy kid), as well,
also "at the throttle" (view looking northeast through shed window)
and on the end horsecar (view looking east though west door):
(1948 photos by and © 2002 S. Berliner, III - all rights reserved)
AHA! That old package of Raquette Lake photos from the summer of
1948 revealed the nose of Marion River Carry Railroad #2 through the east door of
the shed and a picture of letter carrier Dave sitting (sprawling?) nonchalantly in the
back of the end horsecar (I didn't remember that Dave was with us but pictures of
the whole family, on the Adirondacks pages, show that he had to have taken them):
(1948 photos by and © 2002 S. Berliner, III - all rights reserved)
It's interesting to note that the opening in the last picture is off center and runs to
the ground; it appears to have been a window, with a personnel and materiel access
door to its left (north) just visible in the earlier end view, thus effectively demolishing
any thought that the shed was double-ended.
Speaking of my sister, here's an oddly blurred image of my father, sister, and mother
(you'll have to take my word for it), from my Adirondacks page 2, at the north-cum-west door to the enginehouse of
the Marion River Carry Railroad c. 1947:
(ca. 1947 photo by and © 2005 S. Berliner, III - all rights reserved)
[Cropped thumbnail image - click on picture for larger, full image]
This is from memory - as I recalled, the path went along the north side of the
enginehouse; the track went right through it! Too bad I didn't focus the old
Voightlander better; I was told that the the junk at right might be the missing left
shed door. Actually "trainshed" might be a better term, since the entire train -
the engine and the three horsecars - was stored right in the shed, always facing east,
with an inspection pit underneath between the rails.
[Please don't ask what happened at the top; bad processing, I'd guess. It's a
rather weird photo by any standards.]
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: Much of the factual material given herein is based heavily on
Harold K. Hochschild's Township 34 (1952), reprinted in several monographs
by the Adirondack Museum ca. 1962, especially Life and Leisure in the Adirondack
Backwoods, Adirondack Steamboats on Raquette and Blue Mountain Lakes, and
Adirondack Railroads, Real and Phantom.
You might also be able to locate a copy of an appropriately-diminutive pamphlet,
"The Carry Railroad, by Richard Sanders Allen, reprinted from York State
Tradition 1965"*, about this equally-diminutive railroad. I found mine
on 09 Jan 2004 and it has no copyright restriction so I've reproduced it below.
* - no publishing data given in the pamphlet.
AHA! Whil(e)(st) up at the Adirondack Museum on 26 Jun 02, I found a book,
"Rails in the North Woods', by Richard S. Allen, William Gove, Keith F.
Maloney, and Richard F. Palmer (North Country Books, Utica, NY, 1978/1999, ISBN
0-925168-69-6), which contains an article, ""The Marion River Carry Railroad',
by Allen and Palmer (pp. 137-146) which closely approximates, amplifies, and updates
the text of that pamphlet.
For more information about the Adirondack Railway and the Raquette Lake Railway,
see my
ADIRONDACKS page.
There is a comprehensive book about all railroads, operating, disused, and
abandoned within the Adirondack Park (and a few on the outskirts); it is Michael
Kudish's 1996 Railroads of the
Adirondacks.
{Last updated (before transferring to this page): 12 Jan 02, 11:30]
Turnouts on the Marion River Carry Railroad - I always remembered the
Marion River Carry Railroad as being just a single track point-to-point (dock-to-dock)
line with no side tracks, spurs, or attendant turnouts (switches), but it had been
abandoned for many years before I stumbled on it with my dad on a canoe trip up
the Marion River ca. 1940-41. Well, an e-mail about switching on the Marion
River Carry Railroad set me to thinking; how could freight cars have been
transported from Raquette Lake to Blue Mountain Lake up the Marion, across the
Carry, and through Utowanna and Eagle, unless there was a way to get them on the
tracks ahead of (or behind) #2? So much material has turned up that it
overloaded this page and has been moved it to
continuation page 1.
Richard Sanders Allen's
"The Carry Railroad"
Having found my copy on 09 Jan 2004 and seeing there is no copyright notice, I
decided to reproduce it in full but the pages scanned oddly. After vainly
trying to straighten the text, I discovered to my chagrin that some pages are printed
askew! Also, some pages developed strange artifacts, probably from ageing of
the paper, which I have touched out. Here, then, for your edification,
"The Carry Railroad" (front cover in color, pages 1 through 8 in B&W -
the inside and back covers are blank):
[These are thumbnail images - click on the picture for a much larger image]
(scanned by S. Berliner, III 09 Jan 2004)
[These are thumbnail images - click on the picture for a much larger image]
Oh, wow! On 22 Mar 2004, I heard that there may well be a railroad
car on the bottom at the north-east end of Blue Mountain Lake and that a diver is
going to look for it this summer; the speculation is whether it could it be that third
MRCRR car? Three boxcars loaded with sacked coal went off floats on Raquette
and Blue Mountain Lakes between 1920 and 1925; one still sits on the bottom off the
M. Callahan and Company dock on Blue. No mystery at all; this is recounted in
Hochschild's "Life and Leisure" (pp. 86-87). Stay tuned for developments!
[Continued on Marion River Carry Railroad
Continuation Page 1.]
If you like model railroading nonsense (and good tips), take a gander at Jim Wells' incredible 
and at the AW NUTS Magazine site, "A Publication of the A.W. N.U.T.S. Garden Railway Society".
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2002, 2004, 2005, 2006,
2007
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