CSX Across the Blue Ridge Mountains & The Engineering Marvel that Made it Happen

CSX is the present day Class I that operates over the former Clinchfield Railroad, a strategic north-south rail line over 4 mountain ranges linking the heart of Appalachia in Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee, to population centers in the Carolinas. It is both the most recently built mainline of this scale in the eastern US and most efficient crossing of the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina, made possible by the "Clinchfield Loops", an engineering marvel that zig-zags up the mountainside maintaining grades well less than the Southern's famous Old Fort loops and Saluda Grade which both cross the same mountains to the south.

Though traffic on this line was sparse during our visits in late 2019 and early 2020, we chased trains through the tunnels and over bridges across the scenic, remote mountain region.

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