Feature Stories

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The PassumpsicRailroad

A Real Life Train SetStory and Photos by Eric BlaisdellEast Barnet – Larry Scott trades in his farmerʼs overalls for a wrench every Sunday and repairs oldtrains.

It is something fun to do on the weekends to “get away from the farm for a few minutes and thinkabout something else besides the back end of a cow.”

Scott is one of several train buffs who devote one day a week to the Passumpsic Railroad, a life-sized railroad set in Barnet that was started by Dr. Marvin Kendall 25 years ago. The train yard is fullof old boxcars and engines, some which are on tracks that run only a couple of feet from a duplex. Itcovers a large field and spills over into the adjacent woods.

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The Passumpsic Railroad hassome pieces that are the last of theirkind in the country, if not the world. Italso has the only operating steam lo-comotive in Vermont.

Scott owns and operates a farmin Newbury that raises beef, pork andemus. His farm sits right next to a setof train tracks, so Scott says he hasalways had a love of trains andwishes he were born 50 years ago sohe could have really enjoyed them.

He drove by the PassumpsicRailroad for over two decades won-dering what was going on. ThenScott met up with someone who vol-unteered at the train yard six yearsago. They brought him over and hehas been coming back ever since.

Marvin Kendall, a former family

medical doctor who now works forVeterans Affairs as a practitioner,started what he calls a railroad mu-seum for the purpose of preservingrailroad culture.

“(In the past) the countrychanged from an agrarian society toa mechanical society,” he said.“When it did, the railroads made itpossible. They changed the wholeworld.”

Most of the items were donated,but some had to be bartered for.

“If I find one of a kind relics I gotalk to (the owner). Sometimes ittakes years for us to get into somesort of agreement. For one of thecars, we took some large bouldersout of a manʼs field (in trade),” hesaid.

Marvinʼs son Jim Kendall, a me-chanical and electrical engineer, isthe fourth generation Kendall to bepassionate about trains. He enjoysrestoring old things and likes the en-gineering challenges that rebuildingtrains can bring. He has a vision touse the train yard as more than amuseum; he wants to turn it into arailroad theme park. He sees it as away for people to connect with a by-gone era.

“We have a real hands-on com-ponent that most preservation placesdonʼt have,” Jim Kendall said in aphone interview about what he wantsto turn the Passumpsic Railroad into.“Families can come and not just betourists. You can roll up your sleevesand move around rails, drive railroadspikes and operate railroad equip-ment of all kinds.”

Story continued on page 18

Clockwise from top left: Dave Traczyk giving a tour of the inside of a caboose; LarryScott next to a train engine that he has been working on; Marvin Kendall started thePassumpsic Railroad 25 years ago.


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Cont. from page 15He is already preparing the sixth

generation of his family to work onthe trains as he brings his six-year-old son to the train yard to help.

There is no timetable for havingthe park up and running becausethere are so few volunteers and theyonly work one day a week. The im-mediate plans involve finishing offthe mile long track, including a bridgein the woods, so that it is a completeloop for the trains to run on, but eventhat is a year or two off. The track isbuilt by hand and involves movingrails that weigh between 1200 and1500 pounds each. To move one railtakes between eight to twelve peopleusing special tongs.

Dave Traczyk worked at a trolleymuseum in Connecticut before mov-ing to Vermont, so he has some fa-miliarity with the mechanics of thejob. He now works at a scale com-

pany and has been volunteering atthe Passumpsic Railroad for about12 years.

“Itʼs just something different andunusual. Everyone has different hob-bies and interests. To save some ofthis stuff is kind of nice,” saidTraczyk.

There is so much restoration andmanual labor to do that the men haveto prioritize what needs to be done.Some of the men have even re-signed themselves to the fact thatsome projects will not get done intheir lifetime. Traczyk says that itcomes down to time, energy andmoney.

“You are split up between thethree. You only have so much time,especially since you only work oneday a week on things. You are limitedto people coming and going andmoney is the other factor. You haveto pick your priorities,” he said.

Angie Nelson lives in the duplexapartment building on the propertywith her husband and five children.She enjoys living so close to the trainyard.

“I love to hear the sound of it as itis going around,” she said. “Thehouse shakes like an earthquake,which is what I like.”

The Kendalls use to run a Christ-mas train in December for the publicand would give the donations fromthe passengers to a Romanian or-phanage. That has fallen through thepast couple of years because ofother responsibilities and just beingtoo busy, but they do plan on bring-ing it back.

The Passumpsic Railroad is nota theme park yet and visitors areasked to receive permission beforethey arrive.


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Story and Photos by Eric BlaisdellIthaca, N.Y. - A copʼs clothes are ripped off in a striptease. A llama runs in a

field. The devil and a dragon protect a princess. They are helping Bread andPuppet get across its social message at a recent performance at Ithaca College.That message was a commentary on the Occupy movement as well as otherprotests around the world and how modern culture has failed its citizens.

While the connections may be lost on the average person, they are visuallystimulating and the show is entertaining. If nothing else, the audience can enjoysome harp and accordion playing while a cardboard lion dances.

Story continued on page 12

Susie Perkins plays the drum during a recent perfromance ofBread and Puppet at IthacaCollege


Scenes from Bread and Puppet’s “3 or 4 Plays fromthe Republic of Cardboard” at Ithaca CollegeTop: Esteli Kitchen, Ali Boyce, Katherine Nook andLili Weckler perform. Bottom Left: Performer Kather-ine Nook.


Bread and Puppet is a theater group out of Glover,Vt., that performs political shows using puppets made outof cardboard and papier-mâché. It is planning to travel toChina at the end of May, but there have been some prob-lems that are holding up the trip.

The current show, “3 or 4 Plays from the Republic ofCardboard,” has chants of “No, No, No” and dirt sprinkledonto the hands of cardboard police before they throwsad-looking cardboard protesters in jail. Watching theshow the viewer could grasp what the performers weretrying to say, even if the performers did not exactly know.

“You really have to think about it and hear it 20 milliontimes to be like, ʻOhhh,ʼ” resident company memberSusie Perkins said after passing around an oversized tophat made out of cardboard to collect donations from theIthaca audience. Perkins is one of the main puppeteerswho also played a trombone, a harp and helped narratethe stories.

She blamed the confusion about what the perform-ance was actually saying on Bread and Puppetʼs founderPeter Schumann. Schumann is from Germany andPerkins says that he gets caught up in the text and hecan lose American audiences who do not understandwhat is going on.

She does not think the text takes too much awayfrom the performance, however.

“You can do puppetry without text; you donʼt needany text to convey the idea,” Perkins said.

While the troupe is touring, company manager LindaElbow is busy back in Vermont trying to untanglearrangements for a trip to Chengdu, China, in late May. InChina, Perkins says Bread and Puppet will focus more onpuppetry and less on text when they perform a shadowshow. The show will use a white sheet and the puppetswill be behind the sheet with a light pointed at them.

“It is less words, it is poetry and then shadows so it isvery abstract so you could interpret it however,” she said.“In puppetry you can get away with so much because it isjust images. You are not really saying anything.”

The other member of the resident company, Kather-ine Nook, is excited to perform with Bread and Puppet foronly the second time overseas. She is eager to performthe shadow show and to work with the cardboard and thelights to create different things.

“A lot of times, even though we do focus on precisionof movements (in our current show) it is a little morerough. With shadow shows you canʼt really be rough be-cause it doesnʼt show the way you want it to,” Nook said.

This will be Bread and Puppetʼs first visit to Chinaand it may be its last.

The theater company is working with Chinese The-

ater Works, based out of Brooklyn, N.Y., to attend aworldwide puppetry festival from May 27 to June 3.

“That is the theory,” company manager Elbow said byphone. “Weʼre not there yet. It is very complicated. Iʼll be-lieve it when we are there.”

They normally tour overseas and have performed inTaiwan, but never in mainland China. One of the prob-lems holding up the trip is financing. When Bread and

Puppet goes overseas, one of the stipulations of the con-tract is that the venue has to pay for transportation.

“The Chinese do not pay for transportation; they payfor accommodations when you get there,” she said. “Chi-nese Theater Works applied for a grant to fund the traveland the expenses connected with travel, but they did notget it. We are going to wind up paying around $3,000 ofour own money and over $1,000 for visas.”

Elbow says that this is reason enough for Bread andPuppet to not make a return visit to mainland China. Shesaid that the group is still going because they have beenworking with Chinese Theater Works for three years onthe shadow show.

Another hiccup in the process is that the timeline hasnot been finalized.

“(Chinese Theater Works) doesnʼt know exactly whatthe schedule is going to be, which makes me have to putoff getting visas, which Iʼm going to have to do by mail,”Elbow said. “Iʼm going to have to collect everybodyʼspassports and send them off for a while.”

Bread and Puppet is not going directly from theUnited States to China. They already have two tour datesscheduled in Poland on May 23 and 24.

In Poland, where they have performed before, Breadand Puppet will work with The Puppet Academy fromWroclaw to develop a show based on one of their forms:An Insurrection Mass and a Funeral March for a RottenIdea. The company will work with the academy to comeup with a “rotten idea” based on a local issue the Polishare experiencing.

“I was selling posters after theshow and people were coming

up to me and grabbing me by thethroat and saying ʻwhat the hell

was that about.ʼ”-Linda Elbow,

Bread and Puppet manager

They will also build an oven inPoland to bake the bread that Breadand Puppet is famous for. Thegroupʼs founder Peter Schumann,who was not at the performance atIthaca, said about his bread from theBread and Puppet website, “We giveyou a piece of bread with the puppetshow because our bread and theaterbelong together. For a long time thetheater arts have been separatedfrom the stomach. Theater was en-tertainment. Entertainment wasmeant for the skin. Bread was meantfor the stomach. The old rites of bak-ing, eating and offering bread wereforgotten.”

Once the show is developed thecompany and the Polish students will

then travel to Bielsko-Biala to per-form it. The show will revolve aroundholding a funeral for rotten idea andultimately burying the idea written ona piece of paper, either in the groundor in a trashcan.

Elbow, who used to tour with thecompany, has experienced firsthandthe different ways audiences inter-pret Bread and Puppet shows.

“It is very interesting what worksand what doesnʼt,” she said. “Ihavenʼt toured for a while, but I re-member being down in New York onetime and I was selling posters afterthe show and people were coming upto me and grabbing me by the throatand saying ʻwhat the hell was thatabout.ʼ

“When we did it Poland peoplewere coming up after the show intears and taking off their jewelry andgiving it to us,” Elbow said.

She went on to talk about a timethe group performed in the formerYugoslavia and there happened to bea group from Cuba in the Audience.Elbow said that the Cubans were theonly ones who laughed at the com-edy show, which meant to her thatpeople in the United States are morealigned to those in Latin America asopposed to Europe.


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