From the Boston Globe, Saturday December 12, 1993. Edaville fans are left lonesome for railroad By Steve Shepard SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE For the first time in 50 years, Edaville Railroad is dark this holiday season. The popular tourist attraction in South carver, which featured approximately 200,000 multicolored Christmas lights, animated exhibits, and a train ride through 1,800 acres of cranberry bogs, drew about 100,000 people each December alone. It was forced to close this year because of increased rents and a rise in local taxes. Since Thanksgiving, Edaville owner George Bartholomew has fielded calls from people making their annual trek to the Christmas fan- tasyland off Route 58 only to find an empty parking lot and a barren train track. "I've had so many calls from people who say, 'Do you realize I've been coming for 30 years?'" Bartholomew said. "People who first came as children have brought their children, and in some cases their grandchildren. I'm very saddened by the fact that it's the end of Edaville." The showcase of Edaville was its tiny train, a steam-powered locomotive at least 100 years old, with passenger cars that had meandered through the bogs ever since Ellis D. Atwood originally laid the tracks in the 1940's. It is, Bartholomew notes, the only complete 2-foot-gauge rail-road system of its kind in the world. Gauge refers to the width between the rails. The gauge of a standard railroad is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. Bartholomew said he knew last May that Edaville would have to close when a new lease was drawn up by the owners of the working cranber- ry bogs where the amusement park is located. "They wanted to raise the rent substantially," he said. That, coupled with maintenance costs, which Bartholomew said approached $300,000 annually, would have made the cost of admission this year prohibitive. "We always prided ourselves on being reasonably priced," Bartholomew said, but he had a hint that the end was near last Christmas, when the father of a large family looked at the $12.50 ticket price for adults and $7.50 for children and said, "Geez, I only wanted to ride on this thing; I never wanted to buy it." For the past several months Bartholomew, who first worked at Edaville in 1956, when he was 14 years old, and who bought the railroad when he was 27, has been trying to sell the attractions and rides at Edaville. Above all, he wanted to keep the old railroad intact. That goal was realized last week when an agreement was reached with a nonprofit group from Maine [see ME2FT.TXT in CIS TRAINNET LIB 2], which plans to bring the narrow gauge train to Portland. Ironical- ly, the railroad will return to the state from which it was origi- nally rescued as salvage 50 years ago by Atwood. As Bartholomew tells it, Edaville's origins are both practical and sentimental. After a particularly good cranberry harvest in the early '40s, Atwood traveled to Maine to buy parts of the small railroads that operated there between 1879 and 1941. The 2-foot- gauge trains, Bartholomew said, were extensions of the regular rail systems of the day and were designed to haul both people and freight to remote regions. "The demise of the little Maine 2-foot railroads," Bartholomew pointed out, "was the advent of the automobile. People didn't need to ride these trains anymore." Atwood, a train buff, figured he could save one of these small railroads and use it on his cranberry bogs. His intent was to haul cranberries and sand around his estate and transport workers as well. He set up the train on a 5 1/2-mile loop on his property and put the train to work for him. Before long, and without any planning on Atwood's part, it became a tourist attraction. People heard of this strange, steam-powered miniature railroad and came from miles around to see the curiosity. Soon they were asking for rides. Atwood gave the visitors rides, but they wanted some- thing more as a souvenir. To comply, he printed and sold tickets for a nickel at the end of every ride. But as the railroad's popularity grew, and the numbers of people increased, there were requests for Atwood to adhere to a more regular schedule. That's when he upped the ticket price to a dime. The Christmas festival was an offshoot of Atwood's own tradition of lighting his estate brightly during the holidays. He simply added more lights and decorations around the train loop, and a new tradition was begun - a tradition that ended without fanfare last year. But this story has a happy ending, at least as far as the train is concerned. Bartholomew is pleased that the Maine group, which calls itself the Maine Narrow Gauge Railroad, is not only rescuing the Edaville Railroad from the scrap heap once more but is bringing the train back to the tracks where it originally ran 100 years ago. There's hope for the Christmas festival as well. Bartholomew would like to sell the rest of Edaville's displays and exhibits, including an old-fashioned carousel and paddle-wheel boat, to a nearby community so that the Edaville tradition can continue. I'm looking to keep it intact," he said.