The Bucksport Branch is a railroad line in

Maine Maine ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the New England region of the United States, and the northeasternmost state in the Contiguous United States. It borders New Hampshire to the west, the Gulf of Maine to the southeast, and the Provinces and ...

that was operated by the

Maine Central Railroad The Maine Central Railroad was a United States, U. S. class 1 railroad in central and southern Maine. It was chartered in 1856 and began operations in 1862. By 1884, Maine Central was the longest railroad in New England. Maine Central had expand ...

. It is now part of the

Pan Am Railways Pan Am Railways, Inc. (PAR) is a subsidiary of CSX Corporation that operates Class II regional railroads covering northern New England from Mattawamkeag, Maine, to Rotterdam Junction, New York. Pan Am Railways is primarily made up of former C ...

system. The Bucksport Branch junctions with the mainline at Bangor and continues south down the

Penobscot River The Penobscot River (Abenaki: ''Pαnawάhpskewtəkʷ'') is a U.S. Geological Survey. National Hydrography Dataset high-resolution flowline dataThe National Map, accessed June 22, 2011 river in the U.S. state of Maine. Including the river's W ...

valley, passing through

Brewer Brewing is the production of beer by steeping a starch source (commonly cereal grains, the most popular of which is barley) in water and fermenting the resulting sweet liquid with yeast. It may be done in a brewery by a commercial brewer, ...

and terminating at Bucksport. This branch was chartered in 1873 as the Bucksport and Bangor Railroad after its grade had been surveyed in the autumn of 1872. Construction of the line began in the spring of 1873 with trains beginning to run regularly over its whole length on December 21, 1874. The company was reorganized as the Eastern Maine Shoreline Railway in 1882, and leased as the Maine Central Bucksport branch in 1883. The last passenger train from Bangor to Bucksport ran on 27 January 1932. In the latter decades of Maine Central operation, two freight trains per day were typically pulled by a cab-to-cab pair of Maine Central's

EMD SW7 The EMD SW7 was a diesel switcher locomotive built by General Motors Electro-Motive Division between October 1949 and January 1951. It was powered by a 12-567A engine. The SW7 replaced the earlier 1,000 horsepower NW2 switcher in EMD's catalog. ...

s and SW9s until the locomotives were assigned elsewhere in the Guilford system. The paper mill at the end of the Bucksport Branch has been the primary customer of the line for many years and with its shutdown by mill owner Verso Paper Corporation The rail traffic on the line will diminish until another large customer can be found. The last rail car removal was on December 11, 2014. The train consist was GMTX 3005 and MEC 374, pulling sixteen tank cars and three boxcars.

Route mileposts

* Milepost 0: Bangor. * Milepost 1.2: Brewer Junction with the former

Calais Branch The Calais Branch is a mothballed railroad line in Maine that was operated by the Maine Central Railroad Company (MEC). The Calais Branch is long and connects Brewer to Calais. It was constructed in 1898 and carried freight and passengers over ...

. * Milepost 9.4: South Orrington chemical plant originating or terminating 2,000 annual carloads in 1973. * Milepost 19.3: Bucksport large paper mill and

Penobscot Bay Penobscot Bay () is an inlet of the Gulf of Maine and Atlantic Ocean in south central Maine, a stretch known as Midcoast Maine, in a broader Atlantic region known as Down East. The bay originates from the mouth of Maine's Penobscot River, ...

seaport originating or terminating 18,000 annual carloads in 1973.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Bucksport Maine Central Railroad Rail infrastructure in Maine Pan Am Railways Bucksport, Maine