Back when the state’s rail plan was being hammered out, numerous public meetings took place in Brunswick and elsewhere.

Support was overwhelming, in Brunswick and Freeport, which were being considered for an extension of the Downeaster, as well as other locations throughout the state, which hoped to get an extension one day. Towns further up the coast, hoping that Maine Eastern Rail would interface with the Downeaster at Brunswick for travel as far north as Rockland were also excited. Local merchants and restauranteurs extoled the virtue of having the Downeaster in Brunswick. Advocates for college students, the elderly and nondrivers were pleased. It was an issue that the whole town got behind, a moment of genuine unity.

It wasn’t that long ago, folks. We’re talking five years ago. Politicians arrived. Ribbons were cut. Train platforms were built. Stationmasters were hired. Restaurants and hotels opened. Public art was commissioned. Remember?

And from day one, the plan for Brunswick’s Downeaster included an overnight facility, so the trains could be parked indoors and wouldn’t have to run overnight, belching diesel fumes.

This wasn’t a surprise, or at least it really shouldn’t have been. The devil, of course, is always in the details. Where does the facility go? In whose backyard?

Well, it turns out, for environmental reasons, financial reasons, technical reasons and track permission reasons, the only rational place to put the thing is between Church and Stanwood streets, on the site of a former, very active railyard, not far from Pleasant Street. Since the railyard closed down, the neighborhood has become residential, but it is bisected by the train tracks, and the right of way has never been rescinded, something that new buyers have to be told when they purchase a home or land in the corridor.

Diesel fuel jells if the temperature drops below 45 degrees, so there are two choices. Either the trains run constantly in cool weather or they are housed indoors. For the benefit of the neighbors, the best solution is to house them indoors, in a layover facility that will allow them to be plugged in.

But as Amtrak moved forward with the plan to build its facility on the site, the neighbors who, in the meantime, had bought or built houses near the site of the former railyard, decided they didn’t want the layover facility in their backyard, and fought it in town council, even taking the fight to the state, and got an unlikely supporter in Gov. Paul LePage, who encouraged the Federal Railroad Administration to review the layover facilitysiting plans.

The Brunswick West neighborhood, where the facility is to be sited, has been fighting the construction of the buiilding all along. But they are also the most vocal critics of running the trains on the same site without the buiilding, and are now demanding a power source be put in to allow the trains to switch off.

While environmental assessment would have had to have been done in any case, and funding secured for the project, the irony is that all the negative effects the neighborhood is complaining about would have been resolved by the layover facility that was being fought against so desperately.

Neighborhoods change over time; that neighborhood certainly did. Old images of the railyard show it to be the busy, industrial heart of town. The layover facility won’t return the neighborhood to that level of activity, but it will ultimately become a part of a neighborhood that is changing again, this time, toward its own historic past.