Edaville Railroad

41°50′45.4″N 70°46′22.0″W / 41.845944°N 70.772778°W / 41.845944; -70.772778

Edaville Railroad (also branded Edaville USA and Edaville Festival of Lights) is a heritage railroad and seasonal attraction in South Carver, Massachusetts. Originally opened in 1947, it was one of the oldest heritage railroad operations in the United States. It is a 2 ft (610 mm) narrow gauge line that operates excursion trains for tourists, built by the late Ellis D. Atwood (initials E.D.A., for which Edaville is named) on his sprawling cranberry farm in Southeastern Massachusetts.

Atwood purchased two locomotives and most of the passenger and freight cars when the Bridgton and Saco River Railroad was dismantled in 1941. After World War II he acquired two former Monson Railroad locomotives and some surviving cars from the defunct Sandy River and Rangeley Lakes Railroad in Maine. This equipment ran on 2 ft (610 mm) narrow gauge tracks, as opposed to the more common 3 ft (914 mm) narrow gauge in the western United States. Atwood purchased the equipment for use on his 1,800-acre (730 ha) cranberry farm in South Carver. After the 1945 cranberry harvest, Atwood's employees built 5.5 mi (8.9 km) of track atop the levees around the cranberry bogs. Sand and supplies were hauled in to the bogs, and cranberries were transported to a "screen house" where they were dried and then sent to market. Atwood's neighbors were enchanted with the diminutive railroad. At first, Atwood offered rides for free. When the demand for rides soared, he charged a nickel a ride. Eventually the line became less of a working railroad and more of a tourist attraction.

Atwood died in 1950, the result of injuries he received when the oil burner in the screen house exploded. His widow Elthea and nephew Dave Eldridge carried on operations at Edaville until the railroad was purchased in 1957 by F. Nelson Blount, a railroad enthusiast who had made a fortune in the seafood processing business. The Atwood Estate retained ownership of the land over which the railroad operated, a key point in later years. Blount operated Edaville for the next decade, hauling tourists behind his favorite engine #8 and displaying his ever-growing collection of locomotives. Among these was the Boston and Maine Railroad's Flying Yankee. This helped form the basis for his Steamtown, USA, collection, first operating at Keene, New Hampshire, before moving to Bellows Falls, Vermont. (It would later move and be reconstituted as the Steamtown National Historic Site in Scranton, Pennsylvania.)

Blount also leased some of the 2 ft equipment from Edaville to operate at two theme parks in the Northeast: C. V. Wood's Freedomland U.S.A. in the Bronx, New York, and Pleasure Island in Wakefield, Massachusetts. Freedomland operated their leased equipment as the "Santa Fe Rail Road" attraction, sponsored by the actual Santa Fe Railway company. The leased equipment, including steam engines Monson #3 and Monson #4 as well as several passenger cars and cabooses, was delivered to Freedomland each spring and returned to Edaville when the park closed for the season in September or October. The engines now can be found in separate museums in Maine.

Nelson Blount died in the crash of his light airplane over Labor Day weekend in 1967. Blount's friend and right-hand man Fred Richardson continued on as general manager until the railroad was sold to George E. Bartholomew, a former Edaville employee, in 1970.

Edaville continued operations for another two decades with Bartholomew at the helm. The railroad operated tourist trains from Memorial Day thru Labor Day plus a brief, but spectacular, Festival of Lights in December. In the 1980s, Bartholomew's attention was divided between the narrow gauge Edaville, and the 4 ft 8+1⁄2 in (1,435 mm) standard gauge Bay Colony Railroad he was then forming, running over disused Conrail branch lines. To some observers and former employees, Edaville began to stagnate around this time, although the annual Christmas Festival of Lights continued to draw huge crowds.

In the late 1980s, after Mrs. Atwood died and the Atwood Estate evicted Edaville, Bartholomew was forced to cease operations. He eventually put the railroad up for sale in 1991.