(rshsdepot) North Woodstock, NH

[I95BERNIEW_@_aol.com]

From today's New Hampshire Union  Leader.
 
Bernie Wagenblast
 
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
A train station rises again
By LORNA COLQUHOUN
New Hampshire Union Leader Correspondent  
WOODSTOCK – In another age, when silk and lace  were in fashion, trains 
stopped at a station in North Woodstock, where guests  would step off into a stage 
that would take them to the Deer Park hotel. 
 
Built back in the late 1880s, the Deer Park was part of the grand hotel era  
in the White Mountains, but later vanished. The train station also vanished  
nearly 70 years ago. 
On Monday, work began just a few feet from the old footings of that station  
and sometime next month, a new train station will open at the Cafe Lafayette  
dinner train. 
"The footings of the old station are just a few yards from this one," said  
Lance Burak, who has owned the dinner train with partner Leslie Holloway for 19 
 years. "We've wanted to put one up for years." 
As near as they can tell from their research, the former station was built  
around the 1850s and was dismantled in the 1940s, with parts of it used in the  
construction of a house elsewhere in town. 
"So this is going to be the first train station built in North Woodstock  
since the 1850s," Burak said. 
He and a crew who can usually be found on the dinner train set about Monday  
putting together a post and beam barn. It went up fast. 
"We started at 8 a.m. and had the rafters up by 5:30 p.m.," Burak said  
yesterday. 
Once it is finished, the plan is to paint it tone-on-tone in blues and whites 
 to look like "it's been here forever," Holloway said. 
The couple has had an interest in history since opening the dinner train.  
Over the years, they have taken old railroad cars and transformed them into  
rolling dining rooms that take passengers on evening dinner excursions through  
the woods and along the Pemigewasset River. 
It now has 150 seats in three dining cars, including two kitchens. 
Their rolling stock includes an old sleeper car from Canada, which once plied 
 the VIA Railroad, and the Granite Eagle, a 1952 Pullman Planetarium car. 
It had originally been built for the Missouri Pacific Railroad and was  
moldering in a Kansas hayfield when Burak and Holloway discovered it in 1995. A  
1945 Army hospital car, later pressed into service in the Cold War, awaits  
future renovation as a kitchen. 
That car features a lively mural depicting a slice of time inside the dinner  
train. Yesterday, Groton artist Kirsten Carruth was at work on it. She 
started  it last year, inspired by a Russian art deco artist. 
"It's the first time I've ever painted the side of a train," she said. 
The Cafe Lafayette opens for its 19th season on May  19.




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