Look what emerged from those plastic shelters this week

As the Free Press predicted last week the plastic wrappings that permitted work to continue all winter on the canopies over the passenger loading platforms at the train station came off Monday and Tuesday. Revealed were two ornate gifts from the state Department of Transportation to the community to shelter the people who will come here to get on and off the trains onto and from the passenger platforms beginning this summer and for years to come. The first ornate canopy structure to be unveiled Monday morning was the smallest, which measures about 30 foot of so in length and is the one near where the new rail crossing barricade will be erected soon across Main Street. The largest one beyond the station is more than 100 feet long and is big enough to shelter half the residents of the community if they were waiting for a train. When this photo was taken yesterday morning, the bigger canopy was in process of being unwrapped, with some staging remaining. The exquisitely designed shelters sitting on the concrete platforms feature bright green-painted metal supports, ceilings crafted of tongue and groove red oak boards, rustic clapboard and a unique gutter-less rain catching system built right into the edges of their roofs and inside their fascia and which will feed rainwater into welded copper piping that feed into the new drainage system on site. Around the base of each canopy structure are panels of decorative stone. (Dan McClelland photos).