Mountain Goat Railroad & Trail

Mountain Goat Railroad and Trail. . A real-life version of "The Little Engine that Could" , In the late 1840s, construction of the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad was already in progress and had reached the base of the plateau below Sewanee. In 1853, Major A.E. Barney, a civil engineer, was commissioned to designed a spur rail line to carry coal from the mines of the Plateau to market, beginning in Sewanee and, over time, extending to Tracy City, Coalmont, Gruetli-Laager, and Palmer., Barney's "Mountain Goat Railroad" earned its name due to its steep climb up onto the Cumberland Plateau from Cowan. At the time, it was the steepest railroad grade in the world., In its heyday, the Mountain Goat line ran 3 or 4 trains a day with both coal and passenger cars. It stopped running passenger cars in 1971 and freight trains in 1984. CSX officially abandoned the line in 1985 and removed the tracks in 1986., In the early 2000s, the Mountain Goat Trail Alliance was formed to transform nearly 40 miles of the former rail bed into a paved, multi-modal trail., Photo caption (bottom right): , Above right: (1) A Civil War-era illustration Showing a "SMCo" (Sewanee Mining Co.) train. (2) an 1880s photo of Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company's "Sewanee #1" engine. (3) The Sewanee passenger depot shortly after its construction in 1896. (4) The Monteagle passenger depot when it opened in 1906. (5) The Sewanee village, looking up what is now University Avenue from the tracks, circa 1870. (6) The Sewanee freight depot, circa 1880, which was razed in the 1960s to make way for today's highway 41A. (7) Sewanee students demonstrating as cameras rolled on the final day of Mountain Goat passenger service in 1971., At right, a map of the proposed 40-mile Mountain Goat Trail. At left, people enjoying completed portions of the trail.