Slumbering Giants: the End of Rail

Back when North Carolina was called the Rip Van Winkle state, asleep while
industry raged on all sides, local industrialists shared a vision of prosperity
that only rail builders could usher in.  It was the late 1800s, just four
decades after the cease of Civil War hostilities, and North Carolina was
suffering.  But before the century would end, a network of steel rail would connect
North Carolina's textile mills and tobacco farms to the markets of Virginia
and harbors on the Atlantic.  And there they would stay for about a century
before consolidation, truck traffic, and changing interstate markets would
make some of them superfluous.

Rail lines are tough to make disappear, though. So if you know where to
look, you can still find their bones slumbering under forests.  And Lord
they are beautiful.

This rail bridge hasn't seen any traffic for forty years by my count, though
it was an important part of the Lynchburg-Durham Railroad at the time. Later
it got consolidated into the Norfolk Western, linking goods through Virginia
to points north and west.  Now, though sections of steel rail still remain
in place, you've got to peer through thickets of young Sweetgum and brambles
to find them. And then only when you've traced that ribbon of steel to the
river bank, do you find this old, forgotten beauty.  Looks like it was
(re-)constructed in 1903, when we still built things to last.  Now it simply
casts a lonely shadow over the river, and even the creosote ties have given
way to a forest growing high over the water.

We tried tracking down other sections of the old, decommissioned Norfolk
Western, and parts of it are still in place.  But parts of it were lifted
and carried away for scrap.  Here's where the steel ends:

Beyond that, only the railroad grade remains, and even that gets hard to
follow.  For example, could you imagine that this was the former path of
locomotives?  You can only see it by following the twin line of pines that
once graced its edges.  We poked around to find not even the ties remain:
they were all carted away.

This picture shows where the old rail line disappeared under the waves of
Jordan Lake. The rail grade is slowly being eaten away, but it's not hard to
imagine tracks running down the valley that would eventually become a lake
in the 1970s.  And there, we found a half dozen old railway ties discarded
at lake bottom.  There's a good chance those steel nuggets are 150 years old
if the tracks were laid in the latter 19th century and remained in place
until the tracks were lifted in the 1950s. For a second, I thought about
bringing one home for a souvenir, but opted to let the lake have them.

  Do you get that restless feeling, when you hear a whistle blast, like an
echo from the past, of an old engine flying down a road that's ironcast
  -- Gordon Lightfoot, "Restless"