CONCORD, N.H. — The state of New Hampshire is now reviewing bids for purchase of the Flying Yankee, the 1935 Budd Co. articulated streamliner built for the Boston & Maine Railroad — including a bid from the non-profit group that has long tried to support restoration of the train that is a virtual duplicate of Burlington’s Pioneer Zephyr.
The state, which has owned the train since 1996, issued a Request for Proposals last November for sale of the train, calling for its “relocation and encouraged restoration” [see “State of New Hampshire seeks to sell …,” Trains News Wire, Nov. 5, 2023]. The train has long been stored at the Hobo Railroad in Lincoln, N.H.; that railroad was one of two tourist operations acquired last August by shortline holding company Patriot Rail [see “Patriot Rail acquires …,” News Wire, Aug. 22, 2023].
The Concord Monitor reports the state’s Department of Transportation is reviewing all proposals submitted by a Jan. 4 deadline and will be posting details and requesting permission to proceed from Gov. Chris Sununu and the state’s executive council in a few weeks, according to a DOT spokesman. Among those proposals is one from the Flying Yankee Association, formed in 1996 to support restoration efforts. The organization’s goal is to restore “restore as much as possible, try to use the original parts as we can …and run the train, not to put in in a museum,” the organization’s marketing director told the newspaper. “We’d be keeping it in New Hampshire, that’s a given.”
In the 1970s the Flying Yankee was stored at Edaville Railroad in Carver, MA. One visit, a door was open and Mom discretely let my brother and I look inside. Though dusty and incomplete, the Art Deco interior was a lot fancier than the B&M Buddliners I rode from Wilmington to Boston for choir practice. (Mom used to lead Youth Hostel bike trips throughout New England in the late 1950s, so when on road trips we came to a rusty railroad crossing, as often as not she’d say “I’ve been here before, by train.”)