Durham & Southern Railway HO Scale Models

The Durham and Southern Railway traced its origins to an 1892 charter granted to George Benton Alford of Holly Springs, North Carolina, who organized the enterprise under the name Cape Fear and Northern Railway. Construction did not begin in earnest until 1898, and the railroad was subsequently reorganized and renamed the Durham and Southern Railway in 1906. The line ultimately stretched approximately 56.8 miles through the piedmont and sandhills of central North Carolina, connecting the tobacco and manufacturing city of Durham in the north to Dunn in the south, with a short branch serving the mill town of Erwin. Along its route the railroad passed through communities including Apex, Holly Springs, Fuquay-Varina, Angier, and Coats, serving the agricultural and industrial traffic of the region. At Durham, the railway shared Union Station with several other carriers, and the line interchanged at various points with the Southern Railway, the Seaboard Air Line Railroad, the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad, and the Norfolk Southern Railway. The Durham and Southern functioned as an independent short line for much of the twentieth century, knitting together smaller communities that might otherwise have lacked direct rail connections to larger markets. The railroad's route through central North Carolina placed it in a strategically useful position as a connector between the larger trunk lines operating in the region. At Dunn, interchange with the Atlantic Coast Line gave the Durham and Southern access to the broader rail network of the southeastern United States, while the connection at Apex with the Seaboard Air Line provided additional routing options for freight moving through the corridor. In 1979 the Durham and Southern was absorbed into the Seaboard Coast Line Railroad, itself a product of the 1967 merger of the Atlantic Coast Line and the Seaboard Air Line, and a predecessor company within the corporate lineage that would eventually become CSX Transportation. Following the consolidation, portions of the old Durham and Southern route were rationalized. The tracks between Apex and Erwin Junction were removed in 1981, severing the line's middle section. The southernmost segment, running from Dunn to the Erwin Junction area, was sold to the Aberdeen and Rockfish Railroad, which operated it as a distinct entity called the Dunn-Erwin Railway before integrating the trackage fully into its own operations in 1990. The closure of the cotton and denim mill at Erwin in 2000 removed the primary traffic justification for that branch, leading to its abandonment and the subsequent conversion of the right-of-way into a rail trail. The northernmost portion of the original Durham and Southern, running between Durham and Apex, remains in active service under CSX, preserving a fragment of the railroad's original alignment more than a century after the line was first built.