The year that is ending saw some big endings. Wiscasset Primary School closed as the town consolidated from three schools into two. And Coastal Enterprises’ (CEI) moved to Brunswick from the nonprofit’s longtime base of downtown Wiscasset properties.

Maine Eastern Railroad’s run in Maine ended and, with it, Brunswick-Rockland passenger rail service. MERR sought to keep its lease on the tracks but the state went with a firm that had no immediate plans for riders.

A lack of local recruits forced the end of Alna’s First Responders; Damariscotta and Newcastle parted ways on public works; and costs proved too great for Wiscasset Area Chamber of Commerce to get a third year of Wings Over Wiscasset off the ground.

Firsts in 2015 included Wiscasset High School’s reopening as Wiscasset Middle High; Wiscasset Middle School became Wiscasset Elementary.

Wiscasset’s Historic Preservation Commission started its work. Getting enough members took months after voters created the panel as part of a new ordinance in the spring.

The Edgecomb farm of Judy Sandick and David Nutt became the site of Maine’s first community solar farm; it started providing electricity July 31.  One at Wiscasset’s Morris Farm got the town’s OK in late fall. And in a separate project in November, Morris Farm had solar panels mounted on the roof of its circa 1840 barn.

Woolwich voters gave pay-as-you-throw and its orange bags the heave-ho at the polls in November, after passing the program at town meeting. In late December, a resident was eyeing a possible new petition to restore PAYT.

The prospect of bowling and other fun at a family entertainment center on Wiscasset’s Gardiner Road had many area residents excited, but not a neighbor. By mid-December, the couple looking to do the project had not returned to the planning board with a site plan.

A would-be charter school in Wiscasset passed up asking the state, in hopes of an alternative, local path to creation.

Key jobs continued to change hands, as Wiscasset Town Clerk Christine Wolfe left for the same job in Freeport and Wiscasset hired ex-Waldoboro clerk Linda Perry. Shortly afterward, Perry settled a court appeal she’d brought against Waldoboro over discipline she’d received as clerk.

Peg Armstrong became Wiscasset Middle High’s principal after Brewer made Cheri Towle its superintendent of schools. Heather Wilmot became the year-old Wiscasset School Department’s first superintendent without an “interim” in the title.

Roland Abbott left his longtime post as head of Wiscasset Ambulance Service after it and Wiscasset Police Department came out winners in town votes over whether to close them. Abbott later was the runner-up in a race for the selectman’s seat that Bill Barnes left early. Former selectman Judy Colby won the seat.

It was not yet known who would take the lead job with the ambulance service; the Wiscasset planner’s job that Jamel Torres left; or who would be Wiscasset Police Department’s next second-in-command. Sgt. Kathy Williams was making plans to retire to Virginia.

School Resource Officer Perry Hatch chose a longtime family tradition of hunting out west in October, over his job. He said in June that he was resigning with a broken heart, after learning he could not take a vacation when school was in session.

Tom Hoepner of Damariscotta became Wiscasset’s resource officer, in a return to the department where he got his start in civilian police work 25 years earlier.

During an April 22 talk with Alna selectmen, town treasurer Aaron Miller turned in his resignation letter and his key to the town office. Miller had said he didn’t have a strong handle on the town’s software and he’d asked the board to hire former treasurer Honora Perkins for guidance on the software. He later offered his free help to the town as it worked through items that the board said dated to Miller’s time as treasurer.

One of 2015’s most remarkable moments for the midcoast happened March 15 in Dubai. Nancie Atwell, founder of Edgecomb’s Center for Teaching and Learning, won the Varkey Foundation’s $1,000,000 Global Teacher Prize. She planned to give the school the money.

Parts of the Hesper and Luther Little turned up at Wiscasset’s landfill. Then a Westport Island man came forward with the surprise claim that one piece was rightly his because he recovered it after fire struck the ships in 1978. It was too late to call dibs, according a legal opinion Town Manager Marian Anderson got; but if the item went on display, selectmen planned to credit the man with its recovery.

In the courts, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court rejected Mason Station’s appeal of a ruling that favored Wiscasset. The town couldn’t take the properties and still pursue hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes, Mason Station argued.

Yes, the town can, the state’s highest court ruled in May. Mason Station had offered no excuse, much less a good excuse, for failing to file a timely response to the town’s complaint, the ruling stated.

Two longtime road disputes in Westport Island became civil cases in Lincoln County Superior Court. In one, the town was a defendant, denying Leslie Lilly’s and husband David Wollins’ claim to the Baker Road spot that the Denver, Colorado couple said was their driveway; in the other, also involving Baker Road, the town sought to get Barbara and Albert Greenleaf Jr. to clear debris from a spot the town claimed was a town right-of-way.

On the local courts’ criminal side, Stacey Parker, 37, of Little Elm, Texas, was extradited to Maine and later pleaded guilty to an unlawful sexual contact charge in a Westport Island case. He was sentenced to serve nine months of a three-year prison term and got two years’ probation.

In a jury-waved trial, Justice Daniel Billings found Corey Pitcher, 46, of Nobleboro not guilty of alleged sexual assaults that Pitcher had been accused of committing 15 years earlier.

Former Wiscasset resident Drew Bibber got five years in prison, following his conviction in the theft of $60,000 in merchandise from Enchantments in Boothbay Harbor. Bibber, who had spent years as a fugitive, apologized in court Oct. 16 to the business’ owners, and to his family and the state.

It may not have been easy to find people who wanted more snow in the midcoast in early 2015. The rapid succession of some storms and the large volumes they dropped kept area road crews and others busy. It was more than Damariscotta’s and Bristol’s salt sheds could take. They collapsed under the weight of snow, officials said in February.