Professor Sulzer introduces us to both the mighty and the humble lines that once traversed this important railroad state. Here we meet Tennessee's own Nashville & Chattanooga (later called the Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis) and the Tennessee Central. We also come across the Dummy Line, the Jerkwater, and the Tweetsie. We follow the story as 4,078 miles of rail in 1920 dwindles to 2,969 by 1975. But this is not a mere compilation of dry statistics on track closings and running schedules. It is a book full of the life and vigor of Tennessee's economic arteries. Although Tennessee's mining and logging resources were depleted and the rail lines abandoned, the isolated towns and villages find their voice in Professor Sulzer's storytelling.

Ghost Railroads of Kentucky (first published in 1967) and its two sister volumes, Ghost Railroads of Indiana (1970) and Ghost Railroads of Tennessee (1975), provide the authoritative account of the abandoned lines in the railroad heartland east of the Mississippi. No mere compilation of dry statistics on track closings and running schedules (though they are here too!), this book is full of the life and vigor of Kentucky's economic arteries. Professor Sulzer, a consummate storyteller, recounts the human drama surrounding these ghost lines. Even poor Alex Richardson, shamefully lynched on the new railroad bridge over the Kentucky River at West Irvine, has his sad story told.

Details the history of railroad closings and their impact on the railroad traffic running from the industrial North and East to the agricultural South and West.

Tennessee Coal Mining, Railroading & Logging in Cumberland, Fentress, Overton & Putnam is a fascinating look back at life in the early 1900s in four counties of the northern Cumberland Plateau area of Tennessee. Featured inside is a wealth of old photographs--more than 200 in the book's 120 oversize glossy pages--maps, and descriptions. Emphasis is placed primarily on the coal camps such as Wilder in Fentress County, with great detail concerning the railroads that served the coal mining communities.

Presents a complete list of streamliner trains from 1933 to 1942. Includes early experiments in the evolution of semi-streamlining, the pioneers, the middle years, the zenith and decline, the conversions and more--the entire story.

Stepping through time to past and present communities, settled in deep hollows and surrounded by ridges and mountains in Tennessee's Appalachia, is to confront a different and disappearing realm. Travel along Hogskin and Richland Valleys. Visit Frenches Mill and Dulaney General Store while passing cantilever barns, one-room school buildings and steepled churches. Listen as octogenarians Robert, Charles, Glenn and others explain life without electricity. Former Cades Cove residents Lois and Inez tell stories of living in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park before it was a national park. Authors Fred Brown, retired journalist, and Harry Moore, retired geologist, explore Tennessee's Appalachian region, recalling its culture, land and people before it vanishes into the abyss of time.

Lewis D. Gasteiger, vice president of the new Pittsburgh Lumber Company in Carter County, Tennessee conspired with William Flinn, president of Booth & Flynn, a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania construction firm to build a spur connection the East Tennessee & Western North Carolina railway. The ensuing railway connected Elizabethon to Laban, Tennessee and enabled unfinished lumber to the Southern Railway. The Laurel Fork Railroad was incorporated in April of 1910 and abandoned in 1925.

The Memphis, Clarksville & Louisville Railroad is a perfect example of rail lines in the mid-nineteenth century. Chartered in 1852, the line ran from Paris, Tennessee, to the Kentucky state line and connected with two other routes to create a seamless link between Memphis and Louisville. It shortened the travel time between major economic cities, but its ability to make money didn't match its founders' aspirations. Its detractors ridiculed the route as "beginning in the woods and ending in a hollow tree." Following the Civil War, the railroad revitalized the line, only to run out of money and largely fade away. Author Todd DeFeo recounts the fascinating story of a historic line.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • "An American masterpiece" (NPR) that chronicles a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South. • The basis for the acclaimed original Amazon Prime Video series directed by Barry Jenkins. Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. An outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is on the cusp of womanhood—where greater pain awaits. And so when Caesar, a slave who has recently arrived from Virginia, urges her to join him on the Underground Railroad, she seizes the opportunity and escapes with him. In Colson Whitehead's ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor: engineers and conductors operate a secret network of actual tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora embarks on a harrowing flight from one state to the next, encountering, like Gulliver, strange yet familiar iterations of her own world at each stop. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the terrors of the antebellum era, he weaves in the saga of our nation, from the brutal abduction of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is both the gripping tale of one woman's will to escape the horrors of bondage—and a powerful meditation on the history we all share. Look for Colson Whitehead’s new novel, Crook Manifesto, coming soon!