Near the villages of Records and Carrabassett, in the town of Carrabassett Valley, the South Fork Carrabassett River is joined by Huston Brook, which flows south from the Bigelow Range. Below the confluence the river is simply called the Carrabassett River (there is no North Branch, but there is a West Branch to the south). The railroad enabled logging of the aboriginal spruce forests of the west branch in 1885, and a large steam sawmill was built at Bigelow in 1899 to convert the headwater forests to lumber. The shift to internal combustion transportation began in 1924 when a Carrabassett veneer mill used surplus World War I tanks to move logs out of the woods. The railroad was dismantled between 1926 and 1936.