Bygone Railways: Hampton & St. Martins Railway Traditional Geocache

Bygone Railways: Hampton & St. Martins Railway

Cache Details

The Cache is located at the site of the former Gully Bridge which was approximately 300' in length. When the railway was shut down, the steel bridge was removed but the concrete pillars and abutments remain. Beside the concrete, a little ways away, you can still see some of the wooden structures of the older trestle which the steel bridge replaced in the 1920's.

Navigating to the cache shouldn't be too bad as the ground is hard packed where the railroad bed was, but it is extremely overgrown. GPSr reception in the gully itself is questionable - my accuracy was 17m when the co-ordinates were snapped. Watch yourself descending into the valley - it's steep and there's no real path.

The Cache is a standard ammo case and contains the following prizes, in addition to the logbook & pen/pencil: Rubik's Cube, RedHat Foam Item, Keyboard Duster, Deck of Cards and some Subaru Stickers. There's also some bandaids in the cache, just in case.

I suggest parking at N45 24.981 W65 37.908 (by pole M386 R75) and head in there. And remember to stick to the railway - which goes pretty much straight. A logging road veers off course.

History

The Hampton & St. Martins Railway was originally conceived to connect the rural communities in the Hammond River valley with the outside world. Hampton, at one end of the line had excellent rail and riverboat service to Saint John. Approximaely 28 miles away, at the other end of the line, St Martins had been a shipbuilding centre and was served by regular coastal freighter. By the 1870's, however, shipbuilding was in decline, and boat connections soon disappeared. As a result, the new railway would provide a lifeline for St Martins as well.

Alas, the area was too sparsely populated, and there were too few industries to ever allow the railroad to prosper. It spent much of its existence in financial hardship and changed hands a number of times. It was taken over and modernized as part of the federal railway system at the end of WW1, but the writing was on the wall. As was the case for many railroads, better road transportation reduced the need for this little branchline even further and it came to its inevitable demise in 1940.

Information stol...er....borrowed from Lou McIntyre, a fellow member of the SJSMR, who introduced me to this location. More inforation can be found at his Hampton & St. Martins Railway Webpage