When I moved from Sagadahoc to Lincoln County years ago, I was surprised to hear the racing miles off at then-Wiscasset Raceway. It was not a faint sound and not especially pastoral, but country living includes hearing chainsaws and four-wheelers, so I didn’t take it as a nuisance, just part of the earscape of rural Maine within a short walk or drive to economic activity.

A lot of the Midcoast is like that. For many of us, a trip to town for errands, work or fun is not a major expedition like when the Ingalls would go to Mankato on “Little House on the Prairie.” We’re near enough to make the trip or trips daily, but outside it enough for good star-gazing on a clear night.

Eventually, a bank sold the track to Richard and Vanessa Jordan, who worked to meet the state’s cleanup requirements for the property and the couple, their big family and other volunteers also cleared the brush away from a cemetery on site and made other improvements to what is now, again, Wiscasset Speedway. Now a thousand or more people come there Saturdays to race or watch the races. I enjoy any local event I cover, but many do well to attract 40 people or 80 or a few hundred, and many of those events happen one day a year. So any profit or nonprofit outfit that can hit the four-digit mark for turnout on a weekly basis for months at a time clearly has a following of locals and out-of-towners, who may stop at a gas station or other business on their way in or out, and are probably telling someone on Facebook or other social media, they’re going to Wiscasset.

I still hear the track now that the Jordans have it. I also hear the train whistle at the Wiscasset, Waterville & Farmington Railway Museum in Alna. That’s a sound I like to hear, for the nostalgia and the success the nonprofit has had. Those are reasons to like the racing sounds also.

We’re glad the Wiscasset selectmen let two Newcastle residents talk Tuesday night about their issues with noise from the racetrack. And we’re glad the board renewed the track’s permit.

The Jordans of Kingfield took a chance on the Wiscasset track. Brunswick keeps getting new jobs by the hundreds, Bath Iron Works is losing jobs and it depends who you ask whether the state’s downtown Wiscasset project will help or hurt business here. Wiscasset’s property taxes just hiked 14 percent, and as far as we’re aware the Mason Station plant still has a way to go before becoming a place where people go to work every day again. The humming of cars around a track on Saturday or Saturday night isn’t a train whistle or an apple thudding, but it’s the sound of economic activity and the sound of hope that others might invest here.