North Carolina

At the turn of the twentieth century, railroads meant progress, growth and development.

In the 1890s Southport, North Carolina became the target destination for a major coaling terminal for ships sailing the Atlantic coast. A new terminal would require a railroad to bring in coal and other supplies. More than twenty companies were formed to pursue this idea over the years, with a few actual accomplishments, but most were purely speculative. Wearying the expectant town for more than twenty-five years, the vision for a great port was whittled down until local entrepreneurs finally built a 30-mile rail line to connect the town to Wilmington.

Local author and railroad historian Mark Koenig chronicles the short life of a short line and the long process of making it a reality.

Greensboro, North Carolina, is but one of many cities located on former Southern Railway’s Washington-to-Atlanta mainline. Greensboro is not the largest city between these points, but it has the distinction today of having the largest and finest Southern Railway passenger station after Washington. Greensboro has a colorful railroad history that begins in the 1850s and endures to this day. The large depot was built in the mid-1920s to serve the tremendous passenger rail traffic that passed through Greensboro. Its grandeur overshadowed every other depot in the state. Today, thanks not only to Amtrak, which remains to serve the city, but also to the passenger train service that the North Carolina Department of Transportation actively promotes to serve throughout the state, the depot continues to flourish as an icon of Greensboro.

West Jefferson did not exist until local entrepreneurs saw an opportunity to run the tracks from Whitetop Mountain in Virginia to North Carolina. In 1914, the Virginia Carolina Railroad came to Ashe County. Virgin timber grew in the mountains, luring the Hassenger Lumber Company into the area. Small sawmills and lumbering operations were located "up every holler," so the tracks were expanded into Elkland, known today as Todd. Until 1933, the train ran daily into the county, and communities such as Nella, Tuckerdale, Camrose, Bowie, Lansing, Warrensville, Berlin, and West Jefferson grew up along the tracks. The timber was gone by 1929, and when the Great Depression came, the Norfolk and Western Abingdon Line made the slow grinding haul up the mountain every week. During the 1950s and 1960s, the spectacular fall leaf displays made excursion trains popular for tourists. The last train ran in 1977, and the tracks in Ashe County were removed, leaving only a few vestiges to show the train was ever here.

The history of the Western North Carolina Railroad is a tale like no other, filled with tragedy, heroism, brains, blood, sweat, tears, nitroglycerin and humor.

Now a tourist mecca, the Great Smoky Mountains were a remote and inaccessible place until well after the Civil War. Using first enslaved and later convict labor the Western North Carolina Railroad and Murphy Branch connected the mountains with the remainder of the state by rail for the first time in 1891. The railroad brought commerce and tourism. Though its vital role was eventually eclipsed by the automobile, tourists and rail buffs continue to come to Bryson City to experience travel by steam train on the Great Smoky Mountains Railroad.

Local authors Jacob Morgan Plott and Bob Plott tell the story of a line that refused to die.

Since the opening of the first permanent railway in 1833, hundreds of railroad companies have operated in North Carolina.

Rail transportation, faster and more efficient than other methods of the era, opened new markets for the products of North Carolina's farms, factories, and mines. Over the years, North Carolina rail companies have ranged in size from well-engineered giants like the Southern Railway to temporary logging railroads like the Hemlock. Cross ties and rails were laid across almost every conceivable terrain: tidal marshes, sand hills, rolling piedmont, and mountain grades. Vulnerable to the turbulent and unregulated economies of the day, few railroad companies escaped reorganizations and receiverships during their corporate lives, often leaving tangled and contradictory histories in their passing.

Richmond County and the Seaboard Air Line Railway presents vintage photographs by talented photographer Frederick "Frank" Marchant (1872-1942). The images document the bustling railroad town of Hamlet and the county seat of Rockingham in North Carolina during the first quarter of the 20th century. Marchant, a native of Pennsylvania, arrived in Hamlet in the early 1900s. By 1907, he was working as a commercial photographer and as the official "picture taker" for the railroad company. Marchant developed a keen eye for interesting subjects, and some of his work took on a photojournalistic quality. His photographs, many of which he published as postcards, record rail activity in the Hamlet area, which became the "hub" of the Seaboard Air Line.

Southern Railway's Spencer Shops was a vibrant part of the Southeast's transportation network for more than 80 years. Starting in the late 1800s and continuing until its closure in 1979, the shop complex and its accompanying yards, transfer sheds, and stockyards constituted a major force in the economy of North Carolina and Southern states. The trains that the shop prepared were hauling everyday freight--Appalachian lumber, Piedmont textiles, and perishables--or were famous passenger trains like the Crescent, the Peach Queen, and many more. Others were more notable, such as the locomotive in the folk ballad "The Wreck of the Old 97" or President Roosevelt's funeral train in 1945. The Spencer Shops was an industrial power whose prominence today is celebrated in its continued role as the home to the North Carolina Transportation Museum. This book tells the story of how Spencer Shops came to be, its role in transportation, and its continued use today as a North Carolina Historic Site.