Rare mileage excursion. On the last day of the 2023 Christmas Festival of Lights, the folks at Edaville Railroad elected to offer a double-header steam special and give the patrons an opportunity to photograph the train in portions of the park where visitors are not normally permitted. In this frame, the special train, hauled by Monson Railroad #3 and Edaville's own Locomotive #11, head east from Atwood Junction along the south shore of Atwood Reservoir, on what's left of the trackage that used to completely circle that reservoir during the latter half of th e 20th Century.
Long-time Edaville fans may recall that after the original Edaville went out of business in 1991, new developers attempted to revive the park in the early 2000s, and unfortunately, the tracks around the northern half of the reservoir were removed and the land sold as housing lots. Today, the park is under new management and operates on roughly 2 miles of track, which forms a loop around the smaller, Turtle Creek Reservoir. The vast majority of the park's excursions transit just that new loop, and never venture out on the track pictured here, mainly because it dead-ends on the east side of the Atwood Reservoir. This excursion was my first opportunity to revisit this "rare mileage" since I first came to Edaville as a kid back in the mid-1960s.
