[Preview] Here at the Adirondack Experience, we have a lot of artifacts and a lot of exhibits. Each artifact holds a unique story of its own. Join us on today’s podcast episode as we take you inside the museum.
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[Diane] One of the very first artifacts that found a new home in our museum was the Porter Engine. That’s a real railroad steam engine. It’s home is the Marion River Carry Pavilion right in the middle of the ADKX campus. The Pavilion has been recreated from photos of the original train depot that was tucked away in a remote area of the Adirondack Park. The Porter Engine sits on a set of rails next to the station. A steamboat waits quietly near the water of the pond. Everything is ready for you to climb aboard the Rickety-Rackety Railway and imagine yourself chugging to your vacation destination.
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[Intro] Ready to earn some extra credit? This is Taylor and Diane and you are listening to ADKX-tra Credit. A history podcast for students made by the Adirondack Experience, the Museum on Blue Mountain Lake, located in the heart of the Adirondack Park of New York State.
CONTENT
[Diane]If you listened to the previous episode titled Are We There Yet?, you already know that getting to the center of the Adirondacks long ago was tough. This is the story of a vehicle that made the trip a little easier. In Are We There Yet? we told you all about how people first began coming to the Adirondack mountain region for vacations. The time period we talked about was around 1870. For this episode we are going to zoom forward to the turn of the century. By 1899 this area of the world was well established as a vacation destination. Especially with very wealthy people.
[Taylor]The Adirondack region now had huge hotels, fancy resorts, even country clubs and golf courses. A number of important and well-known men built second homes for their families. Their second homes are called Great Camps. Some of those Great Camps are still around today. We will talk more about them in a later podcast. For now it’s just important to know that getting to these Great Camps was the driving force behind building the railroads into the Adirondacks. That’s right, these men were so wealthy and had so much influence that railroads were built to take them on vacation!!
[Diane]Another thing that will help you understand how this tiny railroad came to be is hearing the grand ambitions of a guy named William West Durant. WW Durant was also a wealthy man. His dad helped build the Transcontinental Railroad and William wanted to build railroads and houses, too. He inherited a lot of land in the Adirondacks from his father and built several of the Great Camps. He eventually sold them to those important men. He was always planning and building and making deals. He dreamt of making the Adirondacks a vacation playground for the rich. And he wanted to get even richer making that dream real.
[Taylor]One of the biggest hurdles was the difficulty in easily reaching the remote areas where the Great Camps were built. A company called The Raquette Lake Railway built a railroad that took passengers from Thendara, New York all the way to the village of Raquette Lake. That made the trip from New York City to Raquette Lake much, much easier. They could take trains the whole way, no more stagecoach or wagon rides. WW Durant wanted people to be able to go all the way to Blue Mountain Lake in a train. His original idea was that his rich friends could get into their private railroad cars in NewYork City and wake up in Blue Mountain Lake. If you weren’t rich enough to have your own private car, he planned to have a sleeping car that could do the same, so everyone travelling could go to sleep in NYC and wake up in beautiful Adirondacks ready to start a fun filled vacation. That seems reasonable, right?
[Diane]Not so much. First of all you had to be pretty rich to take advantage of all this and be able to go on vacation. Also, there was a big lake and a river in the way. The railway that came to Raquette Lake from Thendara ended right at the edge of the lake, there was still several miles of water between there and the Marion River Carry Railroad. But, Mr. Durant didn’t think that would be a problem. He planned to put those big, heavy, fancy, expensive, private railroad cars on what they called a car float. Those were big barges that were used to transport heavy loads and vehicles across the open water of the lakes or rivers. They planned to float the train car across the lake and up the Marion River. Then they would be unloaded onto his new railroad and travel the ¾ of a mile to Utawana Lake and then get back on a car float and go the rest of the way to Blue Mountain Lake and the hotels and homes there. No big deal.
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[Diane]So what does our Porter Engine have to do with all that? Well, The train with the big numeral 2 on its nose that sits in the middle of our campus is the very same train that went from Raquette Lake to Utawana Lake starting in July 1900. The part of Marion River that runs between Raquette Lake and Utawana Lake has rapids. Because of that boats cannot travel from Raquette Lake Village to Blue Mountain village. If you’re in a canoe or other small boat you take it and all your gear out of the water and carry it to the other body of water. That's why it's called a carry. Marion River Carry.
[Taylor]William West Durant built the railroad for the sleeping cars and private cars that went the length of that Carry, about ¾ of a mile. That’s all. It was known as the smallest standard-gauge railroad in the world. He needed it to be standard gauge like all the other railroad so that the sleeper cars and private cars could use the railroad too. Unfortunately for Mr. Durant, his grand scheme didn’t totally work out. He realized that barging heavy train cars up the Marion River would take at least 4 hours to go only 13 miles. Also, it's pretty likely that the owners of the private cars and the Pullman company that owned the sleeping cars did not like the idea of their expensive vehicles bobbling across a lake and up a river on a barge.
[Diane]I agree! That would be a little scary to me. What if it rolled off or tipped over while people were in there sleeping!!
[Taylor]Right! Instead travellers disembarked the train in Raquette Lake village and took a steamboat to the Marion River Carry if they wanted to travel to the Eckford Chain of Lakes or other points north. At the Carry they took our train just a ¾ of a mile. Then got onto another steamboat for the ride to their next destination.
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[Taylor]The Marion River Carry Railroad carried 8 to 10,000 people a year while it was in service from 1900 to 1929. Since coming to the ADKX as one of the first artifacts, tens of thousands more people have climbed aboard. Museum visitors like to sit in the one remaining passenger car and imagine themselves rocking through the woods. They climb into the cab of the engine and ring the bell.
[Diane]What a great job it must have been to be the engineer of the shortest railway in the world. In the morning you would get a bucket of coal to power your steam engine for the day. The Carry railroad didn’t have a coal car. It was such a short track they only needed a small pile of coal to fire the engine. Once the engineer had the engine fired up he was ready to get the passengers for the trip.
[Taylor]The train had just three cars, two for passengers and one for baggage. We have one of the passenger cars. It’s not what you would expect, it's open, without walls. You just climb up and sit on a bench. These cars were originally horse-drawn street cars from New York City. the one we have still says Brooklyn Rapid Transit on the front. It's funny to think that people thought a horse-drawn street car was rapid transit!
[Diane]Once the people and freight were loaded up the journey began. I have read accounts of trips that describe the ride as very smoky, with smoke and cinders from the engine blowing back onto the passengers. And it must have been loud and kind of bumpy because we have a picture of the train that someone wrote on calling it the Rickety-Rackety Railroad.
[Taylor]As we mentioned before the trip was very short, less than one mile. The track didn’t have a turn-around at the end either. So, for the return trip the engineer backed the train up the whole way.
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[Taylor]The Marion River Carry Railroad made its last run on September 15, 1929. This was because of two major events in national history. The first was the Great Depression. The Great Depression was a serious economic crisis that started in 1929. Many people lost their jobs. Many businesses closed.
[Diane]The second major change that took place was the increase in popularity and use of the automobile. When new technology or inventions come along, they often replace inventions that came before. It’s like when a new iPhone comes out and replaces the older versions. This was the case with train travel. Trains made stagecoaches and wagons out-of-date, and later automobiles made trains and steamboats out-of-date. The building of a paved road for cars from Raquette Lake to Blue Mountain Lake and the addition of other roads in the area made the Marion River Carry Railroad out-of-date. Now people could travel to the resorts and to their second homes in their own private automobiles. They didn’t have to change trains at station after station or change from train to stage to boat.
[Taylor]They didn’t have to build their travel around the train and steamboat schedules. They could come and go on their own schedule. So, new and improved roads were a great advancement for the summer visitors.
[Diane]So, the poor rickety-rackety railway was put to rest in the train shed. It sat in there from 1929 until 1955. Forgotten and forlorn until it was rediscovered and given a new home.
[Taylor]The Adirondack Museum was being constructed in 1955. And the Porter Engine was moved out of that old shed to the spot where it sits to this day. The three cars were in pretty bad shape but the museum was able to reconstruct one car from the pieces of the three. The engine and that car still sit on the grounds of our museum.
[Diane]It doesn’t take trips back and forth along the Marion River any longer. But, I bet if it had a voice it would say it enjoys giving imaginary rides to all our visitors.
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