The Altamont
and Blue Ridge Railway
A Historical
Fantasy
The History
Beginning
with the ill-fated Blue Ridge Railroad way back in the 1850s, efforts
to construct a railroad westward across the southern Appalachians have
been legion. For decades, crews cut rights-of-way into steep
mountainsides and blasted away in great, unfinished tunnels. Had one of
these ambitious railroad schemes been accomplished, a great mountain
city like Altamont would surely have flourished at the place where the
Piedmont was connected by rail to the American heartland. However, a
southern, trans-mountain mainline railroad remained only a dream, and
Altamont never rose, while down on the Piedmont, well south of the
mountains, Atlanta established her reign as the powerful, regional,
east-west junction.
The Fantasy
The
year is 1957. The era of the steam locomotive is nearly over. High in
the southern Appalachian Mountains, somewhere not far from the
Georgia/North Carolina border, the rails of the mighty Southern Railway
connect to the rails of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad at
Altamont, an imaginary city that might have been.
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