Rob Neufeld

Columnist

The Clinchfield Railroad, when completed in 1915, reached 277 miles from Elkhorn City, Kentucky, to Spartanburg, South Carolina. It was incorporated as the Charleston, Cincinnati and Chicago Railroad — the Three C’s — in 1886, with the intention of bringing Virginia and Kentucky coal and Cranberry, North Carolina, iron to coastal ports. Construction began at Rutherfordton in 1886. One financial panic, two takeovers and one railroad company war later, the South & Western Railroad emerged in court as owner of the route through the Virginia-Kentucky gorge called The Breaks, and, upon extending its line to Marion in 1908, changed its name to the Carolina, Clinchfield & Ohio. “The 1905-1915 construction costs,” Cary Franklin Pooler states in “A History of Railroading in Western North Carolina,” “averaged $200,000 per mile, making it one of the costliest railroads to complete.” Its president, George Carter, also owner of the Clinchfield Coal Company, required steel bridges; wide (18-foot), tall (24-foot) tunnels; and safe (1.2 percent) grades. This 1948 photo (by Elliot Lyman Fisher for the Citizen-Times) shows a train passing through the Loops section near Little Switzerland seven years before passenger service ended and three decades before the Clinchfield was incorporated into the CSX Railroad.

—Rob Neufeld, RNeufeld@charter.net, @WNC_chronicler