I wasn’t prepared for what I saw last month when Kris Sabbatino and I re-visited Belfast, Maine.

In 1980, my father and I paid two visits to Belfast, one of which involved a train ride to Burnham Junction and back on the Belfast & Moosehead Lake freight. On those trips I made photos of B&ML’s yard and roundhouse on black & white film using my Leica IIIA.

In August 1997, I revisited Belfast, and found the B&ML yard intact, but ghostly quiet.

I’d read that the good citizens of Belfast despised the railroad yard and its environment and that they had evicted the railroad that the city had once owned.

I was shocked of how completely this quaint delightful compact railroad yard along the Belfast waterfront had been so totally erased from the scene. It has been replaced with a sandy parking lot.

I was unprepared because I had not brought with me the photos from my earlier visits. I found it very difficult to recall exactly where I had stood. The landmarks I knew existed only in my head.

The tracks, the structures, the trains and the character of the environment that I seen in my earlier visits were now gone.

Sadly, I’ll need to return again with my earlier photos in hand and attempt a more accurate series of ‘then and now’ images.

The views below are looking north. My attempts to recreate the roundhouse scenes looking west are not good enough to reproduce here.

Tracking the Light Posts Daily.