Strange New England

When I was a boy, I used to hear the train in the distance in the middle of the night. It broke the stone silence of my world like a knife, a long, lonesome whistle from over the hill next to the Aroostook River Valley, where the tracks ran. It was a sign of life, the Bangor and Aroostook.  I never knew if it was headed north or south. I never saw the night train - I only ever heard its wail. It was reassuring. Even though my neck of the woods was lonely, there were train tracks connecting that loneliness to the wider world, somewhere out there.  I had never been on a train. My parents had taken the B&A to Bangor for their honeymoon, but by the time I was a kid, no passengers rode the rails. Trains were a mystery to me, and I loved them. Once, my father took me to the Allagash to see something strange and wonderful - the ghost trains. In a place with nothing but untamed wilderness as far as the eye could see, we walked a path into the dense forest to discover two steam locomotives just sittin