State

The southbound troins ton backward, because the Grohom County Railroad hod neither wye nor turntable. This one is working steam, os it cuts across a cow pasture. — IMichoel Dunn photo.) Lament for the Graham County Line Rail fans came from all over America lo see lliis unique little railroad at work. By MICHAEL .1. DUNN, III It's lime lo shed a tear for ihe Graham County Railroad. For North Carolina's most unusual little freight carrying railroad — and, until last August, a working showcase of real freight carrying rail-roading from a long gone era — has died. Its loss, though, is softened a bit because the Graham County has left its all-steam operating tradition, and a portion of its facilities and equipment, to the surviv¬ ing Bear Creek Scenic summer tourist railroad. During the recent steam - train - starved years of the 'fifties and ’sixties railroad enthusiasts would come to mountainous Graham County in west¬ ern North Carolina from all over the United States to watch, hear, and hope¬ fully ride this little mountain railroad, which was not only the last common carrier in the country to rely totally on Shay-geared, logging-type steam loco¬ motives, but which if it had lasted but one month longer, to Labor Day, 1970, would have been the only never- diescli/.ed steam railroad active cast of the Mississippi and the second last in all America. All this railfan attention was one of the factors which, a few years ago, prompted Government Services, Inc., operators of the near-by Fontana Vil¬ lage complex, and the Bcmis Lumber Company, major parent firm of the railroad, to set up the Bear Creek Juntion summertime tourist attraction, which was located along the GC near the Topton end of the railroad and which features live steam tourist trains over four miles of the most spectacular trackage of the GCRR. About the only thing that compen¬ sates for the universal sadness at the demise of the Graham County Railroad is the fact that the Bear Creek Junction operation survives and plans to carry on the tourist trains as before. But never again to be seen arc the common carrier freight operations over the en¬ tire dozen-mile line between Topton (where freight cars used to be ex¬ changed with the Southern Railway) and Robbinsville (where a lumber mill, carpet factory and a couple of oc¬ casional customers supplied the traffic that kept freight operations going till 1970). The only trackage that will sec use from now on is the portion used by the scenic trains in summer, the four or five miles nearest to Topton. The GCRR had always been a workaday freight railroad, the sixth shortest common carrier railroad in contemporary North Carolina. Typical Work Day Almost any workday morning its Shay steam locomotive could be spotted collecting cars of friendly smelling lumber from the Bcmis mill out to the southwest of Robbinsville and perhaps, in modern years, picking up a carpet car at the Lees carpel plant. The little train would meander beneath its smoke plume down the gradually narrowing, mountain-hemmed valley, first cutting across small farms and later just playing tag with a woodsy brook until the train finally worked gingerly down a shelf carved into the north wall of Nantahala Gorge, to a yard where the freight cars could be exchanged with the Southern. The informal GC had no turntable or wye; so the steam engine always had to go backwards lo the Southern. But THE STATE. FEBRUARY 1. 1971