Industrial railroading didn’t begin in the City of Montgomery, Alabama until after the start of the Twentieth Century and only two types of industry were covered by private railroading there. These businesses were gravel pits and sawmills, all located on or in the alluvial flood plain of the Alabama River.

The first of these industrial railroads that has been positively documented as being in Montgomery was the Mitchell Gravel Company which purchased a second-hand Baldwin-built 0-4-2 saddletank locomotive in the spring of 1909. However, the operation (at least the railroad side of it) may not have been very successful, as the locomotive had been resold one year later to the equipment dealer in Atlanta, Georgia, from which the locomotive had been originally purchased.

By 1919, the Alabama Sand & Gravel Company, owned by the Hugger brothers, was operating a railroad in its Montgomery gravel pits, though the exact location of this business is not presently known. The company was still in business as late as 1939, but may not have survived through the period of World War II. Its locomotives were the usual assortment of 0-4-0 saddletankers, 0-6-0 switchers and a pair of 4-6-0’s, all purchased secondhand, but AS&G did operate a little 20-ton Shay-geared logging railroad type locomotive for a couple of years in the mid-1920’s.

The Roquemore Gravel Company was operating a private pit railroad by 1921 at a site along the Alabama River that was only about a mile north of the Western Railway of Alabama shop complex. The company purchased two locomotives directly from the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad early on … an 0-6-0 and one of the 0-4-0 saddletankers that had originally been built for the big road’s subsidiary Belt Railway of Montgomery. In 1927, Roquemore purchased four brand new small 0-6-0 saddletank locomotives that were ten years old to be their primary pit locomotives for the next dozen years. These engines had been built for the Russian Government in 1917, but were never delivered to Russia and had been stored in the Cooke Locomotive Works plan at Paterson, New Jersey, until they were sold and shipped to Montgomery.

In 1938, the Birmingham Slag Company of Birmingham, Alabama purchased the Roquemore Gravel Company. The company’s name was changed to Roquemore Gravel & Slag Company at that time, but the operation changed little with regard to its daily functions. Once Birmingham Slag became the foundation of today’s vast Vulcan Materials Company, the corporate entities of Roquemore Gravel & Slag Company and the separate Montgomery Gravel Company were combined to become the Montgomery-Roquemore Gravel Company. Steam locomotive use ended in the early 1950’s with an odd assortment of center-cab diesel-electric locomotives working the pit until Vulcan Materials abandoned it in the late 1970’s.