CSX’s S&NA North Alabama Subdivision

This video shows over twenty-four hours of action on the former Louisville and Nashville, now CSX, S&NA North Subdivision which runs from Nashville, Tennessee to Birmingham Alabama, a distance of two hundred and five miles.  This is part of CSX’s most important north-south traffic lane between Chicago and Florida which they have nicknamed the Southeast Corridor.  Trains were videotaped south of Nashville in south-central Tennessee, between Cornersville and Dellrose.  This part of southern Tennessee is full of winding valleys and high ridges as the tracks pierce the edge of the Appalachian Plateau and Tennessee’s Southern Highland Rim between the Cumberland River at Nashville and the Tennessee River at Decatur, Alabama.  There is even a fifteen hundred foot long tunnel here although it is inaccessible for videography.  At the time that these trains were videotaped in late April of 2017 CSX was a couple of months into the Hunter Harrison era where dramatic changes in train operations were taking place with many hump classification yards and intermodal terminals being closed and trains combined into 10,000 foot monsters.  As an example, two pair of intermodal trains have been added since our 2011 visit to this line but one pair will be re-routed via Atlanta only a week after our visit.    In spite of the train consolidations, the freight train count on this line is nearly triple of what it was fifty years ago.