(The Charlotte Observer posted the following story by Jim Wrinn on its website on April 3.)
SALUDA, N.C. — The storied Saluda railroad grade in Polk County, known as the nation’s steepest mainline route, isn’t about to die. Its 15-month slumber, however, is a little deeper.
Norfolk Southern crews last week severed the rails on the Asheville-Spartanburg, S.C., line near Flat Rock, N.C., and Landrum, S.C., then piled up mounds of dirt to isolate the track, company spokeswoman Susan Bland said.
Placing the line into isolation means the railroad can turn off 22 grade crossing signals, Bland said. Regular inspections required by the Federal Railway Administration will cease.
Some Saluda residents and railroad enthusiasts interpreted the work as the end for the 3-mile-long grade, which is about 90 miles west of Charlotte.
But Bland said the company has no plans to abandon the route.
“The Saluda line is of strategic importance, and we want to keep it for potential future business,” she said. “We don’t want to give up the line, but there’s a number of maintenance jobs and inspections that we won’t have to do if we do this.”
She did not have an estimate on maintenance costs.
The federal Surface Transportation Board must approve rail line abandonments, and no application is forthcoming, Bland said.
The scene of horrendous fatal wrecks in the late 1800s, the grade required extra engines to push trains uphill in the steam locomotive era and is one of the last sites in North America with a runaway track — a section of rail designed to capture the momentum of an out-of-control train like an interstate runaway truck ramp.
The grade at Sauda is 4.7 percent, meaning the tracks rise 4.7 feet for every 100 feet of horizontal travel. That is several times the average on American railroads.
In the last 30 years, the route has been important for freight traffic from the Midwest bound for the Port of Charleston and Virginia and West Virginia coal headed to Carolinas power plants, including the Duke Power plant in Belmont.
But changing shipping patterns caused the railroad to reroute traffic off the Saluda line in December 2001.
Rob McGonigal, associate editor of Trains Magazine in Waukesha, Wis., said Saluda is a historic site on par with Pennsylvania’s Horseshoe Curve route across the Alleghenies near Altoona and Utah’s Promontory Summit, where workers completed the transcontinental railroad.
“As a rail enthusiast, it’s sad to know that trains are no longer using it,” he said. “Hopefully, economic conditions will allow Norfolk Southern to reopen it someday.”