Tons of great stuff so far in this tread. Those L&N boxcars are for sure cool. The camp car in the background of that last shot is neat. I remember seeing a lot of those when I was younger. Really wish I'd taken more freight car shots back in the day.
You'd also greatly enjoy painting cars that manufacturers have ignored, like this N Scale CN&L boxcar. No decals are available, so I had to cut and set in place every letter and the striping too, and on both sides of course. The CN&L was a South Carolina road owned by the ACL for much of its life, but was operated with a high degree of independence. Most of its track remains today as an important link for CSX.
Thank you. I've enjoyed digging out these images. I shot freight cars over the years, but am indebted to a friend who got me more deeply interested them in the mid-80s at that critical time before merger momentum wiped out cars in fallen flag schemes and before vandals with spray cans completely hosed what remained. Caught L&N camp car 43406 in Knoxville, 01/21/1978.
I'm really in awe, here. Everything is just beautiful, all your photos are amazing. I have too many questions to bother. I can't stop looking at the detail on those rails, ties and ballast. I looked up the wiki link on CN&L. ACL acquired control in 1924 and became part of CSX in 1984. It only took a year to build the 75 miles of track, 1890-1891. It says that towns along the route owe their existence to the railroad, so true. Rail lines brought commerce and really built America long before highways and interstates. The only single line tracks I knew growing up have a fascinating history on how they came to be laid here at the mid-point between Raleigh and Greensboro, best detailed in a book called "Company Shops: The Town Built by a Railroad". The tracks ran right beside The Burlington Industries Pioneer Plant, which was right up the street from my old homeplace. It only happened a couple of times during my childhood when I'd hear the strange sound of a steam whistle in a diesel era.. so I'd jump on my bike and head to the tracks for the excitement of an iron horse rolling through. I didn't know then, but they were on their way to being retired at Spencer Shops, which also fits into the story of Burlington, or as it was once called "Company Shops".
I was sitting here thinking about some photos I took in 2016 that are here on our NAS drive. The first one is an N scale model of the original Company Shops. The model sits in a large iron and glass display in our depot. I only have 1 photo of the model in this set, but have more somewhere else, or I may ride up and get new ones, including the outside of the depot/Amtrak station, which was the last remaining building from the original shops (it's one of the buildings on the model).
Wow, what a beautiful model! I'm a little slow sometimes. What is an NAS drive and is this what the railroad facilities looked like in Burlington, NC (former SOU)?
A network-attached storage (NAS) device is a data storage device that connects to and is accessed through a network, instead of connecting directly to a computer.
Sorry for the delay, my friend, I'm on an oddball schedule at the moment. Also thanks to JMaurer1 for the info on NAS. Yes, most newer home network routers have USB ports that allow you to attach a hard drive with a bit of configuration. You can use a simple jump drive, especially for photos and documents, but I recommend a powered hard drive for movies and video. Mine is a 4TB Western Digital HDD (hard disk drive) I got on sale for abt $100. I use it mostly to hold all our movies and video projects I've worked on over the years, but also a 4th backup of all our personal pics and video of family. I don't use or trust cloud storage. Flickr is a good example.. they used to offer 4tb of free storage for photos only (that's a LOT of photos). Then, they were bought out and sent out emails to all users that they had 30 days to reduce their storage to a limit of 1000 photos. I know a lady who worked frantically trying to retrieve all her personal pics she stored only on Flickr. I've struggled, like everyone else, to keep up with digital files since the days of very limited storage (remember the days when consumer digital cameras came with a 1.44mb memory stick?). It is recommended that you keep at least 3 backups of your files. Mine are scattered on various jump drives, DVD-R, etc. I have 1 SSD (solid state drive), 1 terabyte of storage that holds only family memories, but they are expensive. I think I paid $150 on sale. Sorry for being long-winded, I just like to share this info with folks. Most important that we keep our precious files in more than just one location. I think many of us, myself included, have horror stories of losing files via crashed drives, etc. I'm going to have to research more about the "North Carolina Railroad Company", who owned this line and built shops here, pre-Civil War. Before the line was built here, Graham existed (our county seat), but Burlington did not, only farmland. The NCRR was looking for a place to build shops between Raleigh and Greensboro & points west. They were looking at Graham, but Graham not only refused the offer, but passed an ordinance that tracks were not allowed within 1 mile of their courthouse. The railroad had given up the idea of shops here, when a farmer (think his name was Gerringer) offered farmland just northeast of Graham. So, the deal was sealed, the rail line and shops were built, and Company Shops (the town) was born. The first business here was a hotel on what is now main street. The shops closed after the end of the Civil war, and NCRR operations were moved to Spencer, NC. What remained was a town that had already dwarfed Graham and today, the site where the shops stood is considered old Burlington, with all kinds of restoration to our historic district currently going on. I need to research NCRR, Southern and Norfolk Southern more. I read somewhere that before Southern, it was called Norfolk Southern? Anyway, this area is probably a modeler's dream. We had a small line that ran off the main line that I believe was called Burlington's "GoCo" line. It brought supplies to the Western Electric plant which built the "Fairchild Bomber" during WW2, and flew them out via the connected airfield "Freeman Field". After the war, the facility became known as the Nike Missle Plant, owned by the Army and produced missles and radar equipment. I've included photos I've collected of the location of the shops, Nike plant and airfield/GoCo line. I have some more recent photos of the abandoned rails and the unused old Western Electric Nike plant. The soil at the site of the plant is still contaminated to this day, I've heard because of solvents dumped there, other rumours of radiation.. either way, it cannot be sold and restored for some reason.
Neat summary @jaxbeachdays86. Southern Railway merged with Norfolk & Western in 1982 to form Norfolk Southern. I think the original North Carolina Railroad operated between Goldsboro and Charlotte, completed sometime prior to the Civil War. It ended up in Southern Railway's camp. Changes were made (recently?) and I no longer understand who owns it and who operates it.
Yes, it all became Southern. I was confused about pre-Southern because I thought I read somewhere on a forum or webpage that prior to forming in 1894, it was originally NS, then Southern, then back to NS in '82, but I'd never heard that and haven't researched it. The power of misinformation... but yes, Southern operated this line and moved all equipment in and out of Western Electric plant. I have photos around the plant from 2016-2017 before they tore more things down. They still can't decide what they're going to do with it. Big construction started after I visited the site, then stopped. Probably has to do with contamination of the soil, I guess.
The Original Norfolk Southern railroad (Norfolk-Charlotte), from the 1880s was acquired by Southern Railroad in the 1980s. Then with the big merger of Southern and N&W, they reused the old Norfolk Southern name for the new giant railroad. - Tonkphilip
Thank you. I knew I had read something like that, somewhere.. maybe here on TB, can't remember exactly.
Could you double check that date? I have it in my notes they were absorbed by the Southern RY on January 1, 1974.
Ah, you're right. I don't know what I was thinking there. Nice that the new NS honored the old NS with a Heritage Unit. 01/01/2022 Simpson, SC.
I was out in my old stomping grounds, just before dark. I think I'm gonna spend this weekend taking photos of what's left of old rails around my locale. I took a few, but it was getting dark. I want 2 pieces of rail, abt 5' each. There's plenty left in the woods here at the old GoCo junction. How long would I spend with a hacksaw, ya think? I can't make alot of noise. "In local news, a 57 year old man was arrested stealing rail from a wooded area"...
