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Max Miller: All Aboard

Max Miller says people congratulate him on writing a book at the age of 81. He corrects them. He explains he finished the book at 81, but he had been collecting material for most of his life and writing and revising for 15 years.

Max will talk about his book, Along the Valley Line: A History of the Connecticut Valley Railroad on Sunday, Jan. 21 at 4 p.m. at the Chester Meeting House. The Chester Historical Society is sponsoring the talk.

Today people usually refer to the Connecticut Valley Railroad as the Essex Steam Train, a prime tourist attraction of the Valley Shore area, but when the rail began service in the early 1870s, the line carried both freight and passenger between Hartford and Old Saybrook. Max points out the line actually went as far as Fenwick, and the causeway that now leads to the area was originally a railroad trestle—and you don’t have to take his word for it.

“I have a picture,” he says.

The Valley Road continued through changes of ownership and increasing limitations of service until it fell into disrepair and was abandoned in the mid-l960s. In the late l960s, a group of dedicated railroad enthusiasts revived the line in its present form as the Essex Steam Train and Riverboat. Actually, Max points out, the name is still technically the Connecticut Valley Railroad.

“A public relations man suggested the Essex Steam Train; he said it was good for tourism,” he recalls.

Max was himself once vice-president and a director of the Connecticut Valley Railroad.

Max knows the Connecticut Valley Railroad from vital statistics to fascinating trivia. He describes the Chester Depot war when the railroad and the town residents wanted to locate the station in different place, and tells about the young girls in Haddam who waved handkerchiefs from the train windows only to have them speared away by boys with sticks. Max details the movie and the television programs that have shot scenes along the railroad from It Happened to Jane in 1958 with Doris Day to Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull with Harrison Ford in 2007.

Max’s path to publishing the book was one that any author would envy. With no agent and no advance publicity, he went to the office of Wesleyan University Press to ask if they had any interest in the book. Wesleyan, with the Beatrice Fox Auerbach Foundation Fund at the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving, has a program to publish local history. A Wesleyan Press editor called Max back asking him to bring more material. Max worked with Wesleyan Press editors getting the book into final form.

“It was a long hard trip, doing the book,” he says, adding that, in high school, English had been his worst subject.

When he thinks about the book, Max recalls something his mother told him. She advised him to make his mark or “15 minutes after you die you are gone,” he says.

“This is my mark. This is how people will know I have been here,” he says.

Max has loved railroads since he was a small child in Poughkeepsie. (He moved to Connecticut at the age of six.)

“In Poughkeepsie, the railroad was the biggest thing in town. My brother and I would run away and go over there and watch the trains,” he recalls. “We were put out in the sandbox with a clothesline, but we untied the knots and ran away and watched the trains.”

In the Army reserves, after a brief stint in a construction battalion, Max served in a railroad unit that trained at the railhead in Essex. He retired as a first sergeant after what he precisely described as 38 years and four months of service.

After training at the Valley Railroad and seeing the group working to revive it as an historic steam train site, Max decided to volunteer in the effort and also began to collect material related to the railroad. A local chronicler of Middletown’s past encouraged him, giving him historic pictures of the rail line.

“As time went on, it just started to snowball,” he says.

Max not only collected pictures, he started looking for references to the railroad in period newspapers, among them the New Era, which started at the same time as the Connecticut Valley Railroad in the early 1870s. The New Era began as a monthly in Chester and then became a weekly in Deep River.

“I discovered microfilm,” Max explains of how he got access to the newspaper material. “In the evening I would go to the library and copy articles, type them, every time there was a reference to the railroad, every mention.”

Max says he went through more than 5,000 pages in all.”

Max stored his material in binders, starting a new one every 100 pages. At home the collection is everywhere.

“The two car garage, the attic, the basement, the closets, anywhere he can find a spot,” says Max’s wife Rosemary.

Not all the collection is at home. Max has given much of his material to the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center at the University of Connecticut.

“I was glad to give the information to the University of Connecticut. It’s a safe environment, protected from fire, theft, moisture, whatever,” he says.

He is not finished collecting. Recently he found an artifact, a gauge lantern, at a flea market. In the days before trains were electrified, the gauge lantern enabled the engineer to see the water gauge in the dark.

He’s not finished looking at trains either. He has made trips to Cresson, Pennsylvania, to a local inn famous for its vantage of as many as 70 trains a day going by.

“The guys just sit on a big veranda and watch trains,” Rosemary says.

Though he likes looking at any trains, Max says the old fashioned steam engines, like the Essex Steam Train, are his favorites.

“With electricity, the train just starts up. With a steam engine, you see all the moving parts,” he says.

Max and Rosemary have traveled by train, including an 8,000-mile round trip across the country and along the West Coast, but more frequently for long trips they use another mode of transportation: they fly.

Max Miller at the Connecticut Historical Society

Max Miller will discuss Along the Valley Line: A History of the Connecticut Valley Railroad, on Sunday, Jan. 21 at 4 p.m. Chester Meeting House, 4 Liberty Street (snow date Sunday, Jan. 28). His book will be available at lecture and at on Amazon.com.