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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.

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.