Maine Eastern Railroad is looking to make Wiscasset its excursion hub, with new, short round trips to Newcastle and Bath, company officials said.

The Wiscasset Flyer's shorter, mostly Saturday round-trips, 45 minutes to Newcastle and back, and a one-hour round trip to Bath, could be an added tourist draw for Wiscasset and help the company attract riders not looking for the longer excursions on the Mid-Coast Limited’s Brunswick-Rockland route, said Charles Jensen, vice president and chief operating officer for Maine Eastern Railroad's parent company, Morristown & Erie Railway of Morristown, N.J.

“And we think by ... having it as a place people want to come to take a ... train ride to either Newcastle or Bath, that that accomplishes what we're trying to do as well as it helps Wiscasset's tourism off Route 1,” Jensen said, at the railroad stop on the Wiscasset waterfront on June 6.

As he spoke, employees were building a new wooden platform yards from a 1973 caboose the company has brought in to serve as a ticket office. The caboose had been sitting in Rockland unused, structurally sound but in need of a paint job, Maine Eastern Railroad’s manager of passenger operations, Harmony Llanto, said. It arrived in Wiscasset in late May.

Of all the towns the railroad stops at, Wiscasset is the only one where it crosses Route 1 at street level, rather than by bridge or an overpass, Llanto said. That and other reasons support making Wiscasset the hub, Jensen said.

“Because Route 1 crosses our railroad at-grade here and it's a nice town and the bay's here and there's a restaurant base here, we felt that that was the perfect match for us,” he said. “And we have the ability to ... run trains around each other here, where we can't do that in other places, and it's in the center of our railroad, so from that standpoint, it works for us.”

Wiscasset Town Planner Misty Parker described Maine Eastern’s added emphasis on Wiscasset as a positive contribution to the vitality of the Wiscasset village. “The Town is looking forward to the 2014 season and excited about what this partnership could bring to the community,” Parker wrote June 9 in an email response to the Wiscasset Newspaper’s request for comment.

The town has previously tried to get federal funding for a multi-model transportation center on Railroad Avenue, and will continue to seek funding as opportunities arise, Parker wrote. The engineering firm Wright-Pierce, the Wiscasset Transportation Committee and town staff developed the earlier plan, in coordination with the Maine Department of Transportation and Maine Eastern Railroad.

Jensen said he would like to see a complex be built. He did not rule out the possibility of Maine Eastern helping to fund it. “We’re investigating funding sources,” he said.

The Wiscasset Flyer is scheduled to make its first runs on July 4 through July 6. For more information, go to www.maineeasternrailroad.com.

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