Re: “Letter to the editor: Proposed railroad site a significant wildlife habitat” (Nov. 5):

Ole Amundsen III’s concern that a railroad track along Gray Meadow would endanger the birds and wildlife there is totally unrealistic, even if a benefactor were to come forward to fund the entire cost of relocating the Maine Narrow Gauge Railroad & Museum and bringing it back into full operation, without any community grants or loans.

From 1846 to 1853, the St. Lawrence & Atlantic/Grand Trunk, Eastern/Boston & Maine and a host of smaller railways that later became Maine Central all built tracks through seashore and interior wetlands, bridged rivers and streams, ran along lake shores and pierced vast tracts of forest.

Yet during the last 150 years, the impact that passing trains have had on birds and wildlife living adjacent to those tracks has been barely discernible. For many years, a century ago, the Portland-Lewiston Interurban Railway actually ran trains across that very meadow, without any adverse effects on either the birds or the wildlife.

If it appears to Mr. Amundsen that their numbers there have been declining in recent years, I suggest he attribute this to the continuing increase of vehicular traffic on Route 26, which cuts across the meadow, and make note of the frequency of highway roadkill during the past six decades.

I would also call his attention to the fact that what interferes with wildlife propagation and reduces their population is not railway tracks, but man’s steady encroachment on their habitat, with massive housing developments, shopping malls, huge paved parking lots and the tearing up of mountainsides to install windmills.

John Davis

South Paris

Copy the Story Link