The 1957 Pontiac Chieftain Safari wagon going down the rail line in Middletown.

The Providence Journal / Steve Szydlowski

PORTSMOUTH The bright yellow 1957 Pontiac Chieftain Safari station wagon is a restored beauty.

But this is no simple station wagon.

The car was one of 14 purchased new by Fairmount Railway Motors and adapted to run on roads and railroads. Fairmount, which specialized in building railroad maintenance track cars, also painted the car yellow, the color of the Northern Pacific Railway.

Arthur Pierce, 45, of Rehoboth, Mass., looks after the car for owner Alan L. Freed of Alexandria, Va., whose Alan L. Freed Associates runs nonpartisan seminars on the White House, Congress and U.S. foreign policy.

“The car was used by the chief of the road crew for surveying the rails and ties and seeing what needed replacing,” said Pierce.

Indeed, a closer look reveals just what sets this car apart. There’s the badge on the front fenders that identifies the car as a Hy-Rail Motor Car, the Northern Pacific Railway badges on the front doors and the levers — one above the front bumper and two in the rear — that are used to lower the 12-inch flanged rail wheels onto the track. The front wheels are lowered together while the rear two are lowered independently.

A hydraulic piston lifts the car to allow the railroad wheels to set in the track. Each wheel is designed to take about 350 pounds of weight. Power is supplied by the car’s rubber tires, which roll along atop the rail track.

Pierce said the rail car can travel as fast as “35 mph on ribbon rail, or a seamless, straight line rail.”

“It can get booking real good,” he said.

But he said Freed and other railroad enthusiasts who ride railroads in sponsored groups often take little-used lines that are overgrown with weeds and undergrowth.

“On a bad track, it’s more like 5 mph,” he said.

In a telephone interview, Freed said he had always been interested in railroads. He said family members had worked on them going back to the Civil War and he worked on the Penn Central as a brakeman and young engineer and fireman as a summer job while at college.

Reflecting his affection for railroads, the Pontiac’s license plate is GNPS&W stands for the Great Northeastern Pacific South & Western Rail Road, a company that Freed said he made up.

Pierce said he looks after the car, which is insured for $125,000, and delivers it to a location for a rail tour that may include diehard “railfans,” who often have their own vehicles, as well as casual tourists. Rail tours are organized by companies that arrange access to railroad lines. If the line is live, the railroad will run their own cars at the front and rear of the rail tour to ensure safety.

“I’m the curator of the car,” he said of his work delivering the car, clean and fueled and ready to go. He said Freed turns up with friends and drives it, while Pierce follows in a chase car on regular roads, keeping in wireless contact so he can come to the rescue if the car breaks down or goes off the track.

“It’s been known to go off the track,” he said.

He said the rail tours, which can last one to 14 days, take groups of up to 50 people 100-to-150 miles a day to very remote places.

“There are tons of dinner train lines and scenic tour lines,” he said.

“It’s scenery that most people never see, wilderness that is unbelievable,” he added, citing bear and elk and other exotic animals on view from little-used tracks.

Pierce said the car was originally based in Glendive, Mont., which was the headquarters of the Yellowstone Division of the Northern Pacific Railway. The Minnesota-based NPR was chartered in 1864 as the first northern transcontinental railroad and granted nearly 50 million acres in exchange for building a railroad to an undeveloped territory.

In 1970, the NPR was merged with other north-central and northwest railroad companies to form the Burlington Northern Railroad. In 1996, it was merged again to form the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway.

Pierce said Freed has taken the car on rail tours to a number of places since 1994, including “the Gaspé Penninsula and Cape Breton (in eastern Canada), Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and a two week trip in British Columbia, from Vancouver to Prince George.”

He said only two of the converted 1957 Pontiacs are known to still exist and the other is in a museum. Fairmount Railway Motors of Fairmount, Minn., which trademarked “hyrail’ to describe its vehicles, was taken over by Harsco Corp. in the late 1980s. Freed said the car was found abandoned in Glendive in the 1990s.

Pierce said he restored the car after Freed acquired it and he keeps it for him, along with other track maintenance vehicles, including a two-passenger 1898 Velocopide with three railroad wheels and powered by both hands and feet, and a 1940s Fairmount Speeder, a four-wheeled trolley with a roof and a couple of benches powered by a one-cylinder, two-stroke engine, which could be physically reversed for the return journey.

Freed said he found the speeder, which had belonged to the Maine Central Railroad, on a scrapheap in 1979. He bought it for $200, restored it and in 1980 he and a friend took it on a 1,000-mile trip along the recently abandoned Milwaukee Road (railroad line) from Mile City, Mont., to Cedar Falls, Wash.

Although a notice behind the visor of the Pontiac states the car can be driven on roads “at normal speeds,” Pierce said at 8,540 pounds the car did not have the brakes to handle “normal speeds.” He also said it only had a 12-gallon gas tank.

He said part of his restoration included adding a 38-gallon tank and putting in disc brakes with Wildwood racing brake calipers.

Apart from its exotic ability to run on rails, Pierce said the car is equipped with serious lights, including a set in the fenders, and a railroad crossing horn — “Short toot, long toot, short toot.”

Other pieces of advice behind the visor include instructions like: “Lubricate rail equipment and chassis every 2,000 miles.”

And a timeless cautionary note states: “The best safety device known is a careful man.”

For more information, go to:

www.weedroute.com

pelsworth@projo.com