By Justin Franz
NASHUA, N.H. — A group in New Hampshire is trying to revive the restoration of Boston & Maine streamliner the Flying Yankee and announced this week it would like to acquire the train from its current owner, the State of New Hampshire.
The Flying Yankee was built by the Budd Company in 1935 and ran in Maine, Massachusetts and New Hampshire for 22 years until it was retired in 1957. It was privately owned and displayed at the Edaville Railroad for 40 years until it was acquired by New Hampshire in 1997. Since then a non-profit group has been trying to restore the train, first at the Claremont & Concord and most recently at the Hobo Railroad. However, in recent years, those efforts have collapsed and little has happened with the train, only the third of its type built in North America.
Starting in the spring of 2021, volunteers updated and filed all the required state and federal documents to bring the group back into good standing and established a new name, the Flying Yankee Association. Along with that came a brand new board of directors, including several members with business and management experience. The group’s new leaders said that past decisions like only using contractors to restore the train hampered progress and now they plan on using a mix of contractors and volunteers to get it done. The Flying Yankee is presently in a “partially restored state.”
The non-profit presently has $19,000 on hand and has pledges of $470,000 in donations (plus matching funds) for the relocation and restoration of the train. However, they don’t plan on spending any of that money — or taking more donations — until they have a solid plan of what they want to do with the train. Presently, the group would like to acquire it and then move it to somewhere in the Mt. Washington Valley. The group has also talked to Conway Scenic about some day running the train there.
Updates will be posted to the group’s website, flyingyankee.org, as well as its Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram pages. While memberships are not yet available, interested parties are encouraged to visit the website and join the email list to get updates directly to their inboxes.