The Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum held its annual Rail Fest the weekend of September 7th and 8th, 2013. As part of the festivities, restored Southern Railway 2-8-0 #630 took to the former Southern line to Knoxville with a series of round trips to Cleveland, Tennessee. The four 42 mile round trips featured the locomotive running…

1862 was a year of highs and lows in American history. The country was in the middle of a civil war, and one of the bloodiest battles of that war took place in April at Shiloh, Tennessee; near the Mississippi border. That same year, a stroke of President Abraham Lincoln’s pen created the Union Pacific Railroad as one of two companies to build the first transcontinental railroad.

When you think of all of the steam locomotives that were built in the U.S., the ranks of survivors are thin; even more so for operable examples. So what would the odds be that a one-of-a-kind locomotive built for a small logging operation not only survive, but operate in the Twenty-First Century? Not good. But…