Photo of the Week: 1/28/2011

Today's photo goes along with last week's photo. Last week I was debating between two photos to share and picked the one at Elm Street in Lakeport. Today I am going to share the other one I was thinking of last week.

This is the same train on the same day as last week's photo, but in a different location. This is the Lakeport drawbridge just a couple hundred feet north of the Elm Street crossing in the last photo. The trains were running just past the drawbridge, they ended just outside the photo to the left. Then they reversed direction and headed back to Laconia. Without much further ado, here is this week's photo:

This is the same locomotive, the 958, pulling its train over the Lakeport drawbridge. Lakeport was once a very busy railroad town. There was a roundhouse and an engine shed, a freight house and a depot, and 3 tracks running through town in most places. The railroad served docks and factories. A branch line to Rochester split off from the main line here. All of that is gone now. One stall of the engine shed, the freight house and a single track with a tourist railroad on it are all that remains.

This bridge was not originally a drawbridge. It was a wooden trestle crossing the water with two tracks on it. As the railroad traffic dwindled and boat traffic grew, there was no more room on the other side of the bridge to build marinas. However, the bridge was in the way of building marinas on this side of the bridge because boats could not get under the bridge. The bridge was split in the middle, and one track got a drawbridge and the other track was cut off on both ends of the bridge. Today, the bridge is up all summer to allow boat traffic to get in and out, and it is down all winter to allow snowmobiles to use the silent tracks. It goes down in the summer for the caboose trains and for the Bike Week shuttle trains to Weirs Beach. During the normal operating season, the trains turn just short of the drawbridge to not effect boat traffic.