UNITY - On Wednesday afternoon, Tom Falicon of the Great Smoky Mountains Railroad watched as workers dismantled the old Belfast & Moosehead Lake Railroad turntable at Unity Station. Nearby a crane loaded passenger coaches onto flatbed rail cars bound for points south. 

"We bought them a few years back and now we've come to collect them," he said, referring to a 2010 deal in which Unity Foundation sold the last of its railroad assets to Bryson City, NC-based GSMRR in conjunction with Durango, Colo.-based Rail Events Inc.

In the intervening years the deal got a little more complicated, Falicon said. GSMR would still be taking some of the railroad equipment for use in its 32-mile, Bryson City to Dillsboro excursion route including the old turntable, which he said would simplify the company's standard roundtrip tours.

"Steam engines don't like going backward, and they look stupid going backward," he said. "So the train will go to [the end of its route] then turn around and go back," he said.

A locomotive, tender and three passenger cars that were part of the original sale, had since been sold by GSMR to another company, Falicon said, and were bound for Discovery Park in Union City, Tenn. where he believed they were to be installed as part of an exhibit on technology.

All of the cars involved in the 2010 sale were Swedish-made and not part of the railroad's original rolling stock. The foriegn provenance partly accounted for a lack of interest from local rail operators, including Brooks Preservation Society, which started running excursion trains on portions of the B&ML line that year.

BPS Executive Director Joe Feero and he listened as Falicon described the support from his local county commission that allowed GSMRR to stay in business and sustain itself through grant funding.

Feero, whose vision for the Belfast & Moosehead Lake Railroad has largely received a been-there-done-that response from city officials in Belfast where the trains currently operate, lamented that Falicon would be taking the turntable and not him. Unity Station is currently under private ownership and in the process of being redeveloped as a commercial property, but Feero said he could have used the turntable in Brooks or another station closer to Belfast.

"If we had recognized the value of the railroad for tourism, we could have got a grant for it," he said.

The two men watched as workers removed ties one by one, laying the spikes and tie plates at the edge of a the wide recessed cylinder of the turntable. Falicon looked across the rail yard. There were maybe a dozen rail cars and a web of rail leading from the main line. The old station had been repainted as part of its redevelopment but retained many of its old details, and a newer building housed several locomotives.

"There's so much here," he Falicon said. "It should just stay."

The comment seemed sincere, but Feero remained quiet. The deal was done, and had been for over three years.

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Ethan Andrews can be reached at news@penbaypilot.com