Just a little history: The railroad was a lifeline

A couple weeks ago the history article was about the 1942 train wreck, a crash at Brick Street into a bakery truck, killing the driver.  The crippled train continued south into the heart of town, ending just before the Underpass.

Back then in 1942 and up through the 1970s there were two travel tracks and several sidings at the two stations because of all the passengers and freight that moved by rail in and out of town. The freight depot (now the site of the town’s depot parking lot) sat on the east side of the tracks with the passenger station on the east. A small brick building was built in the 1970s near the site of the passenger station and was to serve both passenger and freight business but the Seaboard Airlines Railroad Company ended stops in Wake Forest soon after the building was complete. It still stands at 121 Front Street and has been used for storage by local groups,

In the 1940s W.W. Holding II – and later his sons, Bill and Buddy – operated one of the largest cotton broker businesses in the South, buying, grading and shipping cotton. The original warehouse is now The Cotton Company on South White Street; their later warehouses and office still stand farther south across from Holding Oil Company (a different branch of the family). One of the appointed town offices was that of cotton weigher who earned his salary from the fees he charged to weigh the cotton bales as required.

Royal Cotton Mill – the company lost the second L in its name when it went through receivership (bankruptcy) in the 1930s – shipped its finished goods by rail. In the 1960s Athey Products (the plant is now The Factory) located on South Main (U.S. 1-A then) where it could build a siding to receive the steel and then send out the finished street sweepers and other large construction equipment.

In 1905 or 1906 Seaboard Airline announced that a “Shoo-Fly” train would begin running from Weldon to Raleigh in the morning and return in the late afternoon. That train and perhaps another added later that ran later in the morning and earlier in the afternoon meant people could commute quickly to jobs and shopping in Raleigh. The trains ran up through the 1940s and perhaps even later.

Merchants in Wake Forest, Youngsville and other Wake towns took the train to Richmond and New York City to purchase goods for their stores. Those included Reba Sidenberg, who owned the B&S Department Store on South White Street with her husband, Sam. She went to select the dresses, shoes, coats and suits she knew could sell to her local clientele. The two-sided store – clothes for women and children on the left as you face the store, men and boys on the right – had a wide doorway linking the two sides. It is now Wake Forest Art & Frame and Domino’s.

At least twice a day, sleek express passenger trains with dining cars, sometimes observation cars, came through town. The mail came in and went out by train. Good news, bad news and news about the country came into the telegraph office at the station.

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The rail line through Wake Forest has had a number of names – CSX now, formerly Seaboard Air Line – but it began life as the Raleigh and Gaston Railroad, chartered in 1836 to connect with a new railroad that ran from near Weldon in North Carolina to Petersburg in Virginia. It was the first chartered railroad but was completed after the second railroad which went from Weldon south and east.

It took four years to complete the 86 miles of track, described as “heavy wooden timbers laid parallel to form the track. On these timbers were spiked the flat iron rails, called strap iron.”

The first rolling stock included several freight cars, two coaches for passengers and four six-wheeled engines named Tornado, Spitfire, Whirlwind and Volcano.

As the tracks were built south toward Raleigh, the railroad company began establishing depots, and two of the first were at Huntsville (later named Neuse Station), a mile south of the Neuse River crossing, and at Forestville. Forestville at the time was the village in northern Wake County, home to several stores.

The station or depot at Forestville was in the northwest corner of the intersection where the tracks crossed Front Street, now Friendship Chapel Road. The station also housed the post office for the area. Dr. Calvin Jones was the first postmaster, appointed in 1823, using his house as the office. After Jones left North Carolina for Tennessee the post office was apparently moved to Alston’s Store, located only in “the Forest of Wake,” the name of the township. In 1839 the post office was moved to Forestville and James S. Purefoy became the postmaster shortly after his house, which still stands, was built in the southeast corner of the main road and Front Street. Only a year later the post office was moved to the depot nearby.

It was reported that the residents of Forestville held “quite an Entertainment” on March 19, 1840, when the rail line was completed to that point. It was nowhere as elaborate as the three days of celebration in Raleigh when the first engine pulled into the capital city.

Everyone marveled at the speed of those little engines. Richard Griffin, who lived near Falls of the Neuse as a child, said, “I thought they flew right by me, they went so fast.”

The Tornado was soon maintaining 15 miles an hour carrying the mail, but the railroad’s chief engineer, Charles F.M. Garnett, urged the speed be reduced to 12 for the mail and eight for passenger trains, saying the six-wheeled engines on wooden rails were not as safe as the eight-wheeled engines on iron rails in other parts of the country.

The traffic was not terribly heavy. Griffin recalled: ‘They would advertise that the train would be due at a certain time if it didn’t rain. Sometimes the agent at Forestville would go off squirrel hunting half a mile from the station and they would have to blow the whistle for him to come back to meet the train.” The trains needed to make frequent stops to get more wood for the fire and water for the steam.

The Forestville depot was a point of contention for the Wake Forest College administration and townspeople. They were finally successful in having it moved in 1874 after the college paid $3,000.02. That move was so controversial that it led to a split in the congregation of Forestville Baptist Church, then the church where Wake Forest professors and businessmen and their families worshipped. The longtime pastor, the Rev. Williams Brooks, resigned as a result although he remained a college professor.

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The CSX tracks through Wake Forest now carry only freight trains that run from Raleigh north each day to service businesses and a quarry, taking goods up in the morning, returning at night. The tracks end in Norlina and some of the tracks in Virginia were removed about 30 years ago and the right-of-way sold.

Those tracks are destined to become part of the South East High Speed Rail project being planned by the North Carolina Department of Transportation working with its counterparts in Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia. This is the status of our section of the project as outlined on the website, http://www.sehsr.org.

“The S-Line corridor runs from Raleigh to Wake Forest to Henderson on to Richmond. The rail line is removed from Norlina to Petersburg, Va., while the rail line between Raleigh to Norlina is an active line.

A Record of Decision documenting the Federal Railroad Administration’s approval of study findings was signed March 24, 2017.

With the Record of Decision signed, NCDOT is now working to identify funding sources for final design, land acquisitions, construction and service implementation.

The completion of the Tier II Final Environmental Impact Statement Raleigh to Richmond study and preliminary design process has put the corridor on a firm footing to apply for federal funding or public-private partnerships, should either become available, and matching state funds can be identified.

Once the rail line is restored and built to standards needed for higher-speed trains, the rail line would offer a faster and more direct route north and would help alleviate congestion.

Project Funding

Construction of necessary capital improvements for service from Raleigh to Richmond will cost approximately $4 billion.

Initial estimates indicate revenues will cover ongoing operation and maintenance costs, but a significant amount of funding is needed to establish the service.

Federal funding, federal loans, and/or public-private partnerships with local and state matches will be needed to fund the project.”

(Much of the information for this came from Elizabeth Reid Murray’s “Wake: Capital County of North Carolina.”)