New Orleans & Northeastern Railroad: Map, Queen & Crescent Route & History

Last revised: September 2, 2026

The New Orleans & Northeastern Railroad (reporting mark NONE) was never a big railroad. It did not need to be. One hundred ninety-six miles of pine woods, swamp, and the longest wooden railroad bridge in the world were enough to put Cincinnati on the levee at New Orleans. Captain William H. Hardy dreamed the line in 1868. British capital finally built it. The first regular freight ran Meridian to New Orleans on Saturday, November 3, 1883; the first passenger train followed on the 18th. From that day the road was the southern end of the Queen & Crescent Route—Queen City to Crescent City—and it stayed that way under the Southern Railway, the Alabama Great Southern, and today Norfolk Southern.

The corporate name disappeared on January 31, 1969, when Southern folded the NO&NE into subsidiary Alabama Great Southern. The iron did not. Amtrak’s Crescent still rides it. So do NS freights crossing Lake Pontchartrain on what remains of Hardy’s trestle, still among the longest railroad bridges in the country.

New Orleans and Northeastern Railroad system map 1910 Meridian to New Orleans

New Orleans & Northeastern system map, 1910. The entire railroad is the single stroke from Meridian to New Orleans. American-Rails.com collection.

On this page: At a glance · William Hardy · Erlanger and construction · Lake Pontchartrain · November 1883 · Hattiesburg and the pines · Queen & Crescent · Southern Railway · Norfolk Southern today

At a Glance

Item	Detail
Headquarters	New Orleans (operating); Queen & Crescent management often Cincinnati
States served	Mississippi, Louisiana
Charter	October 14, 1868, Louisiana, as Mandeville & Sulphur Springs. Renamed New Orleans & Northeastern March 16, 1870. Mississippi act March 30, 1871
Opened	First regular freight November 3, 1883; first regular passenger November 18, 1883
Route	Meridian, Mississippi–New Orleans, Louisiana. ICC valuation mileage 195.528; commonly 196 miles
Track gauge	5 ft as built (English rail). Converted with the rest of the 5-foot South in 1886 (regional change May 31–June 1 to 4 ft 9 in; later true standard)
Reporting mark	NONE
Principal traffic	Pine lumber, cotton, fruit, and through freight on the Cincinnati–New Orleans corridor; later Southern / NS general merchandise and the Crescent
Southern control	Interest 1895; remaining English stock bought out late 1916. Equipment lettered Southern with NONE sublettering (diesel block 6800–6979)
Merged	Into Alabama Great Southern, January 31, 1969
Successor	Southern Railway; Norfolk Southern (June 1, 1982). Today the NO&NE District

1960 (last independent-looking year in the reports): 746 million net ton-miles of freight, 13 million passenger-miles, 203 miles of road, 368 miles of track.

William Hardy’s railroad

William Harris Hardy was a surveyor, a lawyer, and a Confederate captain (Company H, 16th Mississippi). After the war he lived at Paulding, Mississippi, and thought about what a reunited country would need for transportation. In his autobiography he put it simply: the Alabama Great Southern was already building from Chattanooga through Birmingham to Meridian. “The more I thought of a line from Meridian to New Orleans the more I became convinced of its feasibility as well as desirability.”

Louisiana incorporated the company on October 14, 1868, as the little Mandeville & Sulphur Springs, a short-line idea on the north shore of the lake. A special act of March 16, 1870, changed the name to New Orleans & Northeastern and pointed it at New Orleans. Mississippi followed on March 30, 1871, authorizing a road from the Pearl River to Meridian. Surveys ran through 1871–72. Then the Panic of 1873 shut the money off. Hardy moved to Meridian as general counsel and did not let the charter die.

In 1877 he reached Montgomery banker Fred Wolf, who reached the New York house of Otto Plock & Company, who reached Baron Emil d’Erlanger—German-born, London-based, and already collecting southern railroads for an English holding company, the Alabama, New Orleans, Texas and Pacific Junction Railways Company. The original charter had expired. A new one was taken out in 1880 with Wolf as president and Hardy as vice-president. Construction, when it finally came, would be Erlanger’s.

Built in twenty-one months

George B. Nicholson drew the southern division, New Orleans to the Pearl River. Samuel Whinery drew the north, Pearl River to Meridian. Actual grading started in February 1882. The ICC valuation later listed the pieces as they went in:

Meridian to Pachuta, Mississippi — completed October 25, 1882 (26 miles)
Pachuta to Heidelberg — January 1, 1883 (13.5 miles)
Heidelberg to Ellisville — May 13, 1883 (23.5 miles)
Ellisville to Hattiesburg — June 20, 1883 (22 miles)
Hattiesburg to New Orleans — November 1, 1883 (110.52 miles)

That is the whole railroad: 195.528 miles, all constructed, none purchased. Motive power and cars came off the Cincinnati Southern / CNO&TP—twenty-five locomotives numbered 201–225. The track was 5-foot gauge, the southern standard, laid with new rail from England. There were no steam shovels. Plows, scrapers, mules, and men did the work through the piney woods and the Louisiana marsh.

New Orleans and Northeastern Railroad public timetable 1910

New Orleans & Northeastern public timetable, 1910. American-Rails.com collection.

The lake

The last piece was the one Hardy had been told could not be built. Lake Pontchartrain is a brackish tidal lagoon, not a river you throw a truss across. The NO&NE went over the eastern arm of it on a wooden trestle that period writers called the longest railroad bridge in the world: about 21 miles of timber, two draw spans for navigation, and approach trestle that was later filled to cut maintenance. At some bents the piles had to go down five deep before they found bottom. The draws sat near mileposts 173.3 and 176.6. The north draw was replaced with a prefabricated lift span in 1986; the south came out in 1988–89.

Filling the approaches shortened what trains actually ride. The Norfolk Southern Lake Pontchartrain Bridge today is about 5.8 miles (30,264 feet)—still the longest railroad bridge in the United States, still a single track, still the NO&NE District. Hurricane Katrina took more than five miles of that track off the bents in 2005. NS had trains on it again in sixteen days. Hardy’s alignment is not a museum piece. It is how freight and the Crescent still get in and out of New Orleans from the north.

November 1883

The first regular freight left Meridian for New Orleans on Saturday, November 3, 1883. A last-spike ceremony at a gravel pit at Derby, Mississippi, is dated November 14. The first regular passenger train ran November 18: engine 203, a baggage car, two coaches, and a sleeper, Conductor Guiteau, Engineer G.E. Reid. One trunk in the baggage car. One passenger in each coach. Seven hours flat. Queen & Crescent advertising later used that date as the birthday of the through route—“Established Nov. 18, 1883.”

The 5-foot gauge lasted less than three years. In 1886 the Southern Railway and Steamship Association roads converted some 13,000 miles from 5 feet to 4 feet 9 inches, mostly over May 31–June 1, so southern cars would interchange with the rest of the country. The NO&NE went with them. The last half-inch to true standard (4 ft 8½ in) came later, in the ordinary course of rail relay, as it did on the rest of what became the Southern.

Hattiesburg, Laurel, and the pines

In August 1880, while the money was still being arranged, Hardy stopped for lunch on the north side of Gordon Creek during a survey. He spread a map of Mississippi on the ground, drew a north–south line through the virgin longleaf toward the Gulf, and marked the crossing of his own future railroad as a station. He named it Hattiesburg for his second wife, Hattie Lott Hardy. She never saw the town. She died in Meridian in 1895. Hardy later named Laurel as well, took the presidency of the Gulf & Ship Island, and founded Gulfport. The Mississippi legislature once tried to name a new county Hardy; the governor vetoed it in favor of Forrest.

What the NO&NE actually hauled, once the mills opened, was pine. The Daily Picayune said the road would “transverse the richest pine lumber section of the world.” Hattiesburg became the Hub City because the Gulf & Ship Island later crossed here on the way to the coast. Cotton, fruit, and through cars for Cincinnati rode the same rails. An 1889 equipment snapshot is the right scale for the independent years: 31 locomotives, 10 passenger cars, 5 baggage-mail-express, 366 box and fruit cars, 126 flats, 934 coal cars, 19 cabooses. This was not a granger empire. It was a bridge line with a timber franchise.

The Queen & Crescent Route

Emile Erlanger did not buy a single railroad from Cincinnati to New Orleans. He assembled a route. The pieces were:

Cincinnati, New Orleans & Texas Pacific — 336 miles, Cincinnati to Chattanooga, operating the city-owned Cincinnati Southern under lease. This is the later Southern “Rathole.” Erlanger controlled the lessee, not the city’s railroad.
Alabama Great Southern — about 295 miles, Chattanooga to Meridian.
New Orleans & Northeastern — 196 miles, Meridian to New Orleans.
Alabama & Vicksburg (successor to the Vicksburg & Meridian) — Meridian west to Vicksburg.
Vicksburg, Shreveport & Pacific — Vicksburg to Shreveport.

Together they were marketed as the Queen & Crescent: Cincinnati the Queen City, New Orleans the Crescent City. The A&V and VS&P later went to the Illinois Central (1926) and are no longer in the Southern family. The other three became Southern’s Cincinnati–New Orleans main. The named train that later carried the slogan, the Queen & Crescent Limited, was a Southern all-Pullman of the late 1920s that never quite beat the Depression or the Louisville & Nashville. The corridor outlived the train. Southern’s Southerner and, after 1970, the combined Southern Crescent used this iron into New Orleans. Amtrak still does.

Period officers list for New Orleans and Northeastern Alabama and Vicksburg and Vicksburg Shreveport and Pacific Queen and Crescent roads

Officers of the N.O. & N.E., Alabama & Vicksburg, and Vicksburg, Shreveport & Pacific—the Queen & Crescent roads south and west of Meridian. D.D. Curran is president and general manager at New Orleans; S.E. Flanagan is superintendent of the Northeastern. American-Rails.com collection.

Southern takes the stock

The Southern Railway, put together by J.P. Morgan from the Richmond & Danville wreckage on July 1, 1894, already had the CNO&TP and AGS in hand by 1890–95. It took an interest in the NO&NE and the rest of the Queen & Crescent in 1895. Full control of the Northeastern waited until late 1916, when Southern bought out the remaining English stock. From then on the locomotives wore Southern lettering with NONE sublettering. New Orleans Terminal Company, builder of Terminal Station at Canal and Basin Streets (1908), came in the same package. The Back Belt across Orleans Parish is that geometry: a way around the riverfront that NS still uses.

The company kept its own books and its own name for another half-century. In 1960 it was still reporting as the New Orleans & Northeastern: 203 miles of road, a Class I by the old tests, and a Southern subsidiary in every way that mattered. Southern simplified the paper on January 31, 1969, and merged it into the Alabama Great Southern. Sublettering changed to AGS. Norfolk & Western and Southern became Norfolk Southern on June 1, 1982. The district name on the dispatcher’s sheet is still NO&NE.

What is left

Norfolk Southern’s NO&NE District is still about 197 miles, Meridian to New Orleans, mostly single track, with a yard at Hattiesburg and sidings at the old names—Pachuta, Enterprise, Laurel, Derby, Pearl River, Slidell. Amtrak stops at Laurel, Hattiesburg, Picayune, and Slidell. The Crescent is the passenger franchise Hardy could not have imagined in 1868 and the Southern would not give to Amtrak until 1979. Freight is general merchandise, chemicals, and whatever the Cincinnati–Chattanooga–Meridian pipeline still sends to the port.

Stand at Slidell and watch a northbound take the trestle. That is the New Orleans & Northeastern. The English holding company is gone. The 5-foot gauge is gone. Terminal Station is gone. The name on the caboose is gone. The line Hardy surveyed through a lunch stop he named for his wife is still the way north out of New Orleans.

Sources

ICC valuation, New Orleans and Northeastern Railroad: corporate history (Mandeville & Sulphur Springs, October 14, 1868; name change March 16, 1870; Mississippi act March 30, 1871); constructed mileage 195.528
Toney A. Hardy, No Compromise With Principle (autobiography and biography of William Harris Hardy), 1946
William H. and Hattie L. Hardy Papers, University of Southern Mississippi McCain Library
Mississippi Rails (David S. Price and Tony Howe): construction narrative, November 1883 opening, Southern 1895 interest / 1916 stock
Poor’s and period Queen & Crescent documents; 1889 equipment counts
Wikipedia / Norfolk Southern: Lake Pontchartrain Bridge length, Katrina restoration (16 days), NO&NE District
Southern Railway locomotive numbering: NONE block 6800–6979

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