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Logging Railroads

Logging Railroads In The USA: History, States & Last Lines

Last revised: September 4, 2026

Logging railroads were not a smaller version of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Most were tools: cheap steel laid into a timber stand, used until the trees were gone, then pulled up and spiked down somewhere else. Some held a common-carrier charter and published a tariff. Many never did. Some lasted fifty years and grew into short lines that still haul wood chips. Others lasted three seasons and left nothing but a grade in the rhododendron.

That is why a complete national roster will never exist, and why this site has never pretended otherwise. Corporate minutes were optional. Locomotives were bought secondhand, lettered with a stencil, and sold when the mill burned. Thomas Fetters, working the Blue Ridge, put the problem in one sentence: the lines that climbed the valleys are largely unknown even to forest rangers who think they know the ground. This page is the national story—what a logging railroad was, how it was built, why the Shay mattered, and when the last industrial log train ran. State catalogs sit underneath it. A handful are already live. The rest will be added as time allows.

Elk River Coal and Lumber Company 3-truck 65-ton Shay 19 fords the Lilly Fork in Clay County West Virginia with five loads of logs November 24 1961 Tom Sink

Elk River Coal & Lumber Company 3-truck, 65-ton Shay #19 (built new for the Tioga Lumber Company in 1905) fords the Lilly Fork in Clay County, West Virginia, with five loads of logs on the late afternoon of November 24, 1961. Tom Sink photo. The Shay later ran at Dry Gulch Junction in Wytheville, Virginia, and is displayed at Veteran’s Park in Harrod, Ohio.

On this page: At a glance · What they were · Before the railroad · How they were built · Shays, Climaxes, and Heislers · Where they ran · Trucks, cutover, and the last trains · What you can still ride · State guides · Books · Related reading

At a glance

Item	Detail
What this hub covers	Industrial logging railroads in the United States: private woods roads, mill tap lines, and the short lines that grew out of them. Not Class I freight, not Amtrak
Common carrier or private?	Both. Many never filed with the ICC. Others were “tap lines”—mill-owned roads with a charter so they could collect originating divisions
Why the records are thin	Temporary track, short lives, company towns, fires. Fetters found 258 operations in South Carolina alone; most states have never had a count that complete
How they differed from a main line	Steep grades, tight curves, untreated ties, fords instead of bridges, rail that moved when the timber did. Rod engines on the flats; geared steam in the mountains
Signature power	Shay (Lima, about 2,770 built 1878–1945), Climax (about 1,000), Heisler (several hundred). Willamette built 33 Shay-pattern engines on the West Coast
Last industrial logging railroad in the United States	Simpson Railroad, Shelton, Washington. Last log extra June 9, 2015; Sierra Pacific took the mills June 30, 2015
Last in North America	Englewood Railway, northern Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Closed November 7, 2017, after a fatal derailment that April. Track removed 2019–20
How to use this site	This page for the industry. A state guide, where one exists, for the companies. Geared steam for the locomotives. Cass and the tourist hub for what still moves people

Shay production follows Lima / George Kadelak counts (commonly rounded to 2,770). Heisler totals disagree in the published lists; the type pages carry the survivor rosters. Information compiled September 4, 2026.

What a logging railroad was

Three things get lumped together and should not be:

Private woods roads. A lumber company laid rail from the landing to the mill, or from the mill to a Class I interchange. No public tariff. No Official Guide listing. When the stand was cut, the steel came up. This is most of the industry, and most of what is lost.
Tap lines. Mill-owned railroads that took a common-carrier charter so they could interchange as a railroad, not as a plant. The ICC spent years on them in the industrial-railways and tap-line cases. Some were a mile of mill track with a name. Some grew into real short lines.
Logging-born short lines. De Queen & Eastern, Fordyce & Princeton, Ashley, Drew & Northern, Warren & Saline River, California Western (the Skunk), and others started as timber roads and outlived the original mill. They belong in this story and on the shortline map.

Narrow-gauge logging is part of this industry, not a chapter of George Hilton’s common-carrier catalog. Hilton was explicit about the difference. Three-foot West Side Lumber, Maine two-foot woods roads, and standard-gauge Shay jobs in West Virginia are the same kind of railroad. They are covered here and on the state leaves, not as a footnote on the narrow-gauge hub.

Rivers, animals, and the first iron

Timber moved before railroads. It floated. A wide creek or a spring drive took logs to a mill or a boom. Horses and mules dragged what water would not take. That worked on the coastal plain and in the lake states while the virgin white pine lasted. It did not work in the Appalachians, the Sierra, or the Olympic Peninsula once the easy timber was gone.

The earliest true logging railroads show up in the 1860s and 1870s, especially in New Hampshire, Vermont, and the lake-state pineries. Iron was still expensive and a conventional grade still meant fills, cuts, and bridges. Lumbermen did not want that bill for a railroad they intended to abandon in a decade. The industry waited on two things: cheap enough rail, and a locomotive that would stay on untreated ties around a twenty-degree curve.

East Branch and Lincoln Railroad 2-4-2T 5 works the mill in Lincoln New Hampshire mid-1940s with 0-4-0T 3 in the background Philip Hastings

East Branch & Lincoln Railroad 2-4-2T #5 works the mill in Lincoln, New Hampshire, on a fall afternoon in the mid-1940s. 0-4-0T #3 sits in the background. Not every logging road was a Shay show. Philip Hastings photo. American-Rails.com collection.

Hack it in, ford it, pick it up

On the coastal plain—eastern Virginia, the Carolinas, Louisiana, the Florida panhandle—a logging railroad could be a rough-cut job: ties in the sand, light rail, a rod engine or a small tank locomotive, grades a main line would have accepted. Those roads were numerous and badly documented. Fetters counted 258 operations in South Carolina in Logging Railroads of South Carolina (Heimburger House, 1990). That is one state.

In the mountains the same companies refused to pay for a Class I profile. They spiked rail up the hollow, around the contour, and through the creek. Bridges cost money. A steam locomotive has no traction motors. If the water stayed below the firebox, a Shay could ford a stream with a train of logs, which is what Tom Sink photographed on the Lilly Fork in 1961. Grades of 5 to 9 percent were working numbers; some jobs ran worse. Conventional rod engines could not live there. That is why Ephraim Shay’s geared locomotive, not a new kind of grading, opened the steep timber.

When a tract was logged, the crew pulled the spikes and moved the steel. A “main line” on a woods map was often last year’s spur. The mill, not the landing, was the permanent plant. Finished lumber still needed a Class I. The famous example in the East is the Chesapeake & Ohio’s Greenbrier Branch in West Virginia, which followed the Greenbrier from Ronceverte toward Durbin and the Western Maryland. Private loggers fed it. The Greenbrier, Cheat & Elk, the West Virginia Pulp & Paper / Mower operation that became today’s Cass railroad, is often cited at about 175 miles at its peak—as long a logging railroad as the country produced.

Cherry River Boom and Lumber 2-8-2 15 at work near the mill in Richwood West Virginia Philip Hastings

Cherry River Boom & Lumber 2-8-2 #15 near the mill in Richwood, West Virginia. A rod Mikado on a lumber railroad: the mill end did not always need a Shay. Philip Hastings photo. American-Rails.com collection.

Shays, Climaxes, and Heislers

The full mechanical story is on the geared steam page. What matters here is why loggers bought them.

Ephraim Shay was a Michigan lumberman. He spent the late 1870s turning a locomotive into something that would stay on his own rough track. Lima Machine Works in Lima, Ohio, built the first commercial engines in 1880 (the first Lima Shay is usually given to J. Alley Company). Shay patented the design in June 1881. Vertical cylinders on the right side drove a longitudinal shaft, universal joints, and bevel gears on every axle. All wheels worked. Trucks could twist. Lima built about 2,770 of them through 1945, in two-, three-, and a handful of four-truck classes. The last was Western Maryland #6, a 150-ton three-truck machine, now the star of the Cass roster.

Charles Scott’s Climax, from Corry, Pennsylvania, put two inclined cylinders (about 25 degrees) onto a centered crankshaft under the boiler. It was cheaper and simpler than a Shay. About a thousand were built. Charles Heisler’s Heisler, patented 1892 and built at Erie, used a V-twin at roughly 45 degrees and a center shaft, with side rods on each truck. Several hundred were built through 1941. Willamette Iron & Steel in Portland built 33 Shay-pattern engines for West Coast loggers after the Shay patents ran out; Lima answered with the Pacific Coast Shay.

They were slow. They were loud. They would walk a train of logs up a grade that would stall a Consolidation. They would also, on bad track, walk themselves off the rail when the driveline length changed—an old Shay complaint. On the flats, loggers still bought tank engines and small rod power. The photographs on this page show both worlds: a Shay in the creek, a 2-4-2T at a New Hampshire mill, a 2-8-2 at Richwood, a Texas Mikado switching at Moscow.

East Branch and Lincoln Railroad 0-4-0T 3 works the paper mill in Lincoln New Hampshire mid-1940s Philip Hastings

East Branch & Lincoln 0-4-0T #3 at the paper mill, Lincoln, New Hampshire, mid-1940s. Philip Hastings photo. American-Rails.com collection.

Five timber maps, not one

Logging railroads followed the timber, not a national plan.

New England and the Adirondacks. Early, often narrow-gauge or light standard, feeding paper mills as much as sawmills. East Branch & Lincoln at Lincoln, N.H., is the photograph; Bill Gove’s books are the bibliography.
Lake states. Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota white pine. Shay’s own country. Cut out early; the grades are now snowmobile trails and county roads. Frank King’s Minnesota Logging Railroads is the standard there.
The South. Coastal-plain density: hundreds of short, poorly recorded roads, some 3-foot, some 5-foot leftovers, many standard. Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, and the Carolinas were thick with them. A few tap lines became the short lines still moving forest products.
Appalachians. West Virginia, western Maryland, eastern Kentucky, the Blue Ridge and Smokies. This is geared-steam country and Cass country. William Warden, Fetters, and Benjamin Kline did the hard interviews.
Pacific Northwest and the Sierra. The longest-lived industrial loggers. California’s West Side Lumber ran three-foot Shays until 1968. Klickitat in Washington still had a Shay on the mill pond in 1964. Simpson at Shelton outlasted all of them in the United States. Kramer Adams, John Labbe, and Peter Replinger wrote the West.

Klickitat Logging and Lumber Company three-truck Shay 7 dumps logs into the mill pond at Klickitat Washington in 1964 on the locomotive final run

Klickitat Logging & Lumber Company three-truck Shay #7 dumps logs into the mill pond at Klickitat, Washington, in 1964, the locomotive’s last run. Photographer unknown. American-Rails.com collection.

Trucks, cutover, and the last trains

A logging railroad died for one of three reasons, and often all three. The timber was gone. The mill burned. A truck became cheaper than a train. Heavy highway vehicles after World War I, and especially after World War II, did not need a grade, a shop, or a crew of five. Makeshift roads went where last year’s spur had been. By the early 1960s most of the classic Shay jobs were shut or dieselized. A few mill switchers and a few long-lived company roads hung on.

There are no industrial logging railroads left in the United States. The last was the Simpson Railroad at Shelton, Washington, on the Olympic Peninsula—a company road with 19th-century roots that had already shrunk from a woods network to a mill-and-sort job. The last log extra to the Dayton dry-sort yard ran June 9, 2015. Sierra Pacific Industries took the mills on June 30, 2015. What remains of the steel is a heritage operation of the Peninsular Railway & Lumberman’s Museum, not a logger.

North America’s last industrial logging railroad was Canada’s Englewood Railway on northern Vancouver Island (Woss to Beaver Cove), a Western Forest Products line whose ancestors dated to 1917. It was not a Shay tram. It was a modern diesel log railroad. A runaway cut killed three maintenance-of-way employees on April 20, 2017. The company announced permanent closure on November 7, 2017. The 90 kilometers of track came up in 2019–20. Older versions of this page still listed Englewood as running. It is not.

WT Carter and Brother Lumber Company 2-8-2 14 switching in Moscow Texas circa 1960

W.T. Carter & Brother Lumber Company 2-8-2 #14 switching at Moscow, Texas, circa 1960. Baldwin built it in 1923 for Rock Creek Lumber; it later worked at Texas Long Leaf Lumber. American-Rails.com collection.

Heritage is not a logger

What you can ride today is a museum with a grade. That is worth doing. It is not the same industry.

Cass Scenic Railroad, Cass, West Virginia—the best-preserved logging railroad in the East. State park. Shays, a Heisler, a Climax, the company town, grades toward Bald Knob. The Greenbrier, Cheat & Elk / Mower lumber railroad underneath it.
Durbin & Greenbrier Valley—Climax #3 on the Durbin Rocket, and the restored C&O Greenbrier corridor between Cass and Durbin.
Yosemite Mountain Sugar Pine, Fish Camp, California—three-foot Shays, including former West Side Lumber power, on a logging-themed grade near the south Yosemite gate.
Simpson remnant at Shelton, Washington—Peninsular Railway & Lumberman’s Museum on leftover company track. Confirm operating status on their site before you drive; it is a preservation project, not a mill job.

Other tourist railroads sit on former timber branches or keep a geared engine. They are listed on the tourist trains hub.

State guides

This directory is written so unfinished states can drop in as links later. Only pages that already exist are linked. Missing names are not broken slugs; they are the research still ahead. West Virginia, Washington, Oregon, and South Carolina are the loudest gaps: Cass and the Greenbrier live on company and tourist pages, Simpson and Klickitat live in photographs on this hub, and Fetters already wrote the South Carolina book.

Live state pages

State	Page
Alabama	Alabama logging railroads
Arizona	Arizona logging railroads
Arkansas	Arkansas logging railroads
California	California logging railroads
Colorado	Colorado logging railroads
Idaho	Idaho logging railroads
Kentucky	Kentucky logging railroads
Louisiana	Louisiana logging railroads
Maine	Maine logging railroads
Maryland	Maryland logging railroads
Montana	Montana logging railroads
New Mexico	New Mexico logging railroads
Other western states (grouped)	Western logging railroads

Still to write

Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New York (Adirondacks), North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin. Others as the books support them.

The books this page stands on

Logging history is a literature of regional specialists. The national story is assembled from their work, not from ICC valuation volumes. The titles below are the ones this site has used most; they are also the place to start before a state leaf is written.

Kramer A. Adams, Logging Railroads of the West (Bonanza, 1961)
Thomas Fetters, Logging Railroads of South Carolina (Heimburger House, 1990)
Thomas Fetters, Logging Railroads of the Blue Ridge and Smoky Mountains, vols. 1–2 (TimberTimes, 2007, 2010)
Bill Gove, Logging Railroads of the Adirondacks (Syracuse, 2006); Logging Railroads of New Hampshire’s North Country (Bondcliff, 2010)
Benjamin F. G. Kline Jr., Tall Pines and Winding Rivers: The Logging Railroads of Maryland (Friends of the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania, 2nd ed. 2007)
Frank A. King, Minnesota Logging Railroads (University of Minnesota Press, 2003)
John T. Labbe and Peter J. Replinger, Logging to the Salt Chuck (North West Shore Line, 1990)
Thomas Lawson Jr., Logging Railroads of Alabama (Cabbage Stack, 1996)
William E. Warden, West Virginia Logging Railroads (TLC, 1993)

Fetters, again, on the research problem: the search was for independent lines, chartered and not, including “primitive wood-railed temporary creations.” He depended on people who had worked the jobs, owned the companies, or still remembered the sidewinders in the hills.

Geared steam locomotives · Shay · Climax · Heisler
Narrow gauge (common-carrier 3-foot and 2-foot; logging trams stay here)
Cass Scenic Railroad · Durbin & Greenbrier Valley
Tourist trains · Museums · Short lines
West Virginia railroads (coal and logging in the same mountains)

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