The Altamont and Blue Ridge Railway
A Historical Fantasy

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 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.