Conway Scenic Railroad Notch Train
— — old coaches on a ledge the road can't reach.
Not only on a wall.
“The Notch Train leaves the 1874 Victorian station in North Conway and runs west into the Mount Washington Valley, then north along the old Maine Central line through Crawford Notch. The route crosses the Frankenstein Trestle and the Willey Brook Bridge on a ledge cut into the south wall of the notch, hundreds of feet above the floor. The coaches are vintage, the locomotive is diesel, and the windows open. In late September the maples in the notch are most of what you see, mile after mile, from a track most cars never get near. from the studio
Conway Scenic Railroad Notch Train, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Conway Scenic Railroad operates out of the North Conway depot, an 1874 Victorian station listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The railroad began excursions in 1974 on the old Conway Branch of the Boston and Maine. The Notch Train is its longest route: a 60-mile round-trip running north on the former Maine Central Mountain Subdivision through Bartlett and Crawford Notch, with a turn at either Crawford's Station or Fabyan, depending on the timetable.
The Mountain Division was completed in 1875 by the Portland & Ogdensburg Railway. The hardest engineering is in Crawford Notch itself: the Frankenstein Trestle, a 500-foot deck-plate-girder bridge 80 feet above the brook, and the Willey Brook Bridge a few miles north. The line clings to a shelf blasted from the cliffs above the Saco River. The Willey House at the foot of the notch marks the site of the 1826 landslide that killed the Willey family while sparing their house, one of the founding stories of the White Mountains.
The Notch Train runs from mid-June through late October. The peak draw is foliage: the last two weeks of September and the first week of October, when the maples in Bartlett and Hart's Location turn red and gold against the dark spruce of the notch walls. The full Crawford round-trip takes about five and a half hours, with a layover at the 1891 Crawford Depot beside Saco Lake. First-class and dome-car seating sell out weeks ahead in foliage season; coach seats remain easier to find.