Top of the Mountain - End of the Line. WW&F Locomotive #10 sits on the spur track at a location known as "Top of the Mountain", as Brakeman Bill Baskerville prepares to throw the switch that will allow her to run around the freight train that you see in the distance. "Top of the Mountain" is an aptly-named spot that is currently the north end of the line for the WW&F Museum trackage. Further north, behind the locomotive, the grade goes rather steeply downhill toward Head Tide. In the days of the old WW&F, the longer freight trains, pulled by the small Forney-type locomotives, were unable to make this grade without help. Since the line never had any extra power that they could spare as helpers on this hill, crews were forced into a procedure they called "doubling the hill." Basically, the crew would split the train into two sections, tying down the back half while the locomotive brought the front half to the "Top of the Mountain"...hence the name of this place. The front half of the train would be backed onto a spur that existed in this location, and the locomotive would then go back down the hill for the rest of the train. The train was re-assembled on the "Top of the Mountain" spur, and then resumed its journey southbound toward Wiscasset.
The WW&F Museum has been building north toward this site for several years. When it was finally reached in the fall of 2014, a full run-around track with switches at both ends was built to allow the turning of the museum's regular passenger excursions, because a re-creation of the original spur siding would not have provided the required utility for normal operations. Ever mindful of the history of the place however, the WW&F Crew built the short spur on which the locomotive sits in this photo at the very end of track. As a symbolic remembrance of what was, the last length of rail on this little spur is one that was saved from the original WW&F, when it was torn up in the mid-1930s.
