Promoters of the proposed Nashville and Chattanooga Rail Road were granted a charter from the Tennessee state assembly in 1845.
When surveyor John Edgar Thomson and railroad promoter Vernon K. Stevenson (Stevenson, Alabama is named after him) set out from horseback from Nashville in 1847 to find a route for the new line, they weren't necessarily looking for the straightest route with the easiest grades. Stevenson was looking for a route where he could buy land cheaply before the railroad was built, and sell off after the line came through. He would play existing towns off one another by asking citizens to purchase stock to construct the line. Money was a magnet drawing the rails to the towns with the most generous subscriptions.
Fearing that Bedford County might not even be considered for the line, John Eakin, one of the wealthiest men in the area, and circuit court clerk John T. Neill approached Stevenson with a deal that was backed by money from several Bedford County locals.
They proposed that the line run through the eastern part of the county and that a spur line be built to terminate in Shelbyville. Evidently there were some power brokers in the county seat who didn't want the smoke and noise created by trains on the main line.
Stevenson agreed, and one of the existing three eastern Bedford County towns had to be chosen for the junction to Shelbyville. The surveyors and common sense prevailed when Wartrace was chosen because it was considered the cheapest and most convenient site from which to begin the spur line.
Track laying commenced in 1851, reaching Murfreesboro by July and progressed rapidly through Bell Buckle, Wartrace and Tullahoma. The eight mile branch from Wartrace to Shelbyville (today known as the Walking Horse & Eastern Railroad) was completed in 1852.
Throughout the civil war the N&C was taxed to capacity by transporting troops, munitions and supplies for first the Confederate then the Union armies. When the Confederates withdrew from Murfreesboro after the Battle of Stones River, tracks were torn up between of Bell Buckle and Wartrace.
By acquiring connecting lines after the civil war, the N&C eventually evolved into the Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis Railway (NC&StL) by 1873. In an effort to eliminate the threat of competition the larger Louisville & Nashville Railroad (L&N) acquired a controlling interest in the NC&StL in 1880. The Dixie Line, as the NC&StL came to be known during the twenties and thirties, was absorbed into the L&N on August 30, 1957.
If you drive down Spring Street past the Walking Horse Hotel toward Hollywood Cemetery you'll see a small limestone-lined reservoir on the right between the street and the tracks. It was built by the railroad in the early 1900's to help slake the thirst of the massive steam locomotives.
The engines required a lot of water and it was pumped from the reservoir to a wooden tank built on stilts located in what is now Memorial Park near the L&N caboose. Gravity fed the water from the tank to a spout located at trackside next to the depot where the engine's tender was filled during station stops.
During the labor intensive steam era, as many as 60 Wartrace families worked either for the railroad or the Railway Mail Service. It's a little known fact that Wartrace at one time provided, in proportion to its population, more railway mail clerks than any other town its size in the U.S.
According to a newspaper article from April 6, 1944, by J. Percy Bramblett, a total of 31 Wartrace based clerks worked the rails between 1898 and March 1944 averaging 12 in service per year. q
During the peak years of passenger train travel, the Dixie Line played host to such Chicago-Florida trains as the Dixie Flyer, often running in three sections; the Dixie Limited, Dixie Express, Dixie Mail, Dixieland, Dixie Flagler, Dixiana, and the Georgian (St. Louis to Atlanta). The limited-stop expresses rarely stopped at Wartrace however, a daylight local, numbers 5 and 6, The Lookout, making a round trip daily between Chattanooga and Nashville, did pause at Wartrace and Bell Buckle in the morning and late afternoon. The line's single remaining passenger train of the late sixties did not survive the creation of Amtrak.
After World War II, centralized traffic control (CTC) was extended over the line until the entire route between Atlanta and Memphis was CTC-equipped by 1953. This eliminated the need for train order operators in Wartrace and Bell Buckle. The end of main line steam locomotive operation through Wartrace ended in 1953 although it survived for a few years longer on the branch to Shelbyville.
Through a complicated series of mergers the L&N, known as The Old Reliable, gradually lost its corporate identity. About 1974 Seaboard Coast Line's advertising began to refer to the SCL, L&N, Clinchfield, and Georgia & West Point Route railroads as The Family Lines. On December 29, 1982 the L&N's identity was erased entirely by a merger with the Seaboard Coast Line. The surviving corporation became known as the Seaboard System Railroad.
Although the preceding components had been a part of CSX Corporation since 1980, the present day CSX Transportation brand was not established until 1987 when all traces of previous corporate incarnations vanished.
Wartrace is located 55 track miles from Nashville Union Station (now a Wyndham Historic Hotel). Traffic on the single track line between Nashville and Chattanooga is dispatched from the state of the art CSX Transportation control center in Jacksonville, Florida. In 2008 plans were made to move the line's dispatching duties to Nashville.
The speed limit between Nashville and Chattanooga varies between 35 to 65 mph depending on track curvature and condition. There are passing tracks allowing opposing trains to pass each other in our area at Fosterville, Wartrace and Tullahoma. The passing track at Wartrace can accommodate a train of 151 cars.
Automatic three-color trackside signals are located at the south end of the passing track outside the Wartrace city limits near the end of Vine Street. The signals maintain a red aspect unless train traffic is imminent. A green signal indicates a clear track for an approaching train. A combination of green and yellow, or green and white, are instructions for the train crew to take a specific route at restricted speed.
CSX Transportation's route through Wartrace is an important corridor from the upper Midwest to the Southeast with approximately 25 trains over the line every 24 hours. The next train you see may be hauling auto parts to an assembly plant near Atlanta, Iowa corn or soybeans destined for a Georgia or Florida seaport, Kentucky or Wyoming coal destined for a southeastern power plant, new cars for a Nashville dealership, a general merchandise train beginning a long journey to the northwest U.S. or an intermodal train carrying containers loaded with UPS parcels or Asian-made electronics destined to big box retail stores.
The railroad is an important part of Wartrace's heritage. If you can appreciate the up-close sound and intensity of 12,000 horsepower lugging 10,000 tons of freight at 50 miles per hour; then downtown Wartrace is the place for you to visit.
