By Justin Franz
A week after learning that its largest freight customer was calling it quits, the president of Maine’s Midcoast Railservice said the company is forging ahead to try and find new traffic on the scenic Rockland Branch and establish a connecting passenger service with Amtrak.
That effort will determine the future of the former Maine Central branch between Brunswick and Rockland; Midcoast has the contract to operate the line through 2025, although it has the opportunity to pull out early if its parent company, Finger Lakes Railway, doesn’t believe it can turn a profit. But Mike Smith, president of Finger Lakes, said he isn’t thinking about leaving the operation yet.
“We’re going to continue our program of finding new business and we’ll see how it goes,” he said.
On September 6, the largest freight customer on the branch, Dragon Products Company, announced that it would shutter its cement plant at Thomaston. The plant there has been open for more than a century and this year is on track to send out more than 1,300 carloads. In a press release, the company cited increasing costs as the reason for closing. The closing process is expected to begin at the end of this year and be complete by 2025.
Midcoast has operated the line since 2022. Before that, it was operated by a series of short lines and even a Class I, including Maine Coast (1990 to 2000), Safe Handling (2000 to 2003), Maine Eastern (2003 to 2015), Central Maine & Quebec (2016 to 2020), and Canadian Pacific (2020 to 2022).
Finger Lakes first began eyeing the operation back in 2021, but then Dragon announced that it was planning on ending its barge operation out of Rockland. Since the 1990s, cement was sent by rail from Thomaston to Rockland where it was loaded onto barges and sent south. In late 2021 and early 2022, Finger Lakes worked with Dragon to come up with an agreement to move cement south on an all-rail route. Smith said with that agreement in place, it made the Rockland Branch more appealing again and Midcoast Railservice was born.
However, Smith said he was never comfortable with operating a railroad with just one major customer and last week’s announcement was a reminder of why that was. Because of that, Midcoast has tried to drum up new business on the branch and it has had some success. Among the new customers is American Steel & Aluminum, which recently opened up a new facility in West Bath. ASA does work for nearby Bath Iron Works and is taking in shipments of steel. The seafood industry is also emerging as a new customer for the railroad, with carloads of lobster bait (aka: fish heads) being waybilled to the yard in Rockland. Both of those customers are still small compared to Dragon, but Smith is hopeful there is more freight business to be found.
Another thing that could keep Midcoast Railservice afloat is passenger service. This summer, the railroad began to offer occasional excursions aboard Budd RDCs and it is working with the Maine Department of Transportation, Northern New England Passenger Rail Authority and Amtrak to eventually offer connecting service with the Downeaster. That could be especially popular in the summer when Midcoast Maine is an attractive tourist destination and U.S. Route 1 is packed with traffic. Smith said the test runs have gone well thus far and people will have another chance to ride the train in October.
