Montgomery County did rate one true logging railroad in the heyday of steam locomotives. The operation was headquartered at Cooks Station out on the Western Railway of Alabama a dozen miles east of the Capitol City. Though the sawmill was stillborn in 1918 under its original name of Elmont Lumber Company, the business did manage to go into operation in 1919 under the name of the Deal-Bachtel Lumber Company. The company’s private logging railroad was laid almost due northward from the WofA at Cook’s Station into southern Elmore County using a 310-foot long truss bridge purchased from the L&N RR to cross the Tallapoosa River. Deal-Bachtel owned motive power common to logging railroad usage, such as an 0-4-4 Forney, a 2-6-0 Mogul and a Lima Shay to operate its railroad. The company cut out its supply of timber in 1927 and shortly thereafter liquidated its holdings in Alabama. Most of the logging railroad’s triple-span truss bridge across the Tallapoosa River was still standing in the early 1990’s, though it had long before been closed to all traffic.

Long after steam locomotives disappeared from the mainline railroads that served Montgomery, and the WofA major repair shop there had closed, two other small private industrial railroads began operating in Montgomery. The clay pit railroad at Jenkins Brick Company was a 3-foot gauge affair using a tiny gas-mechanical locomotive hauling one dump car at a time. The Alabama Electric Steel Company (AESCo Supply Company) used two small locomotives to switch their electric furnace plant in its early days, but the operation did away with its locomotives shortly after Trinity Industries bought out the plant. Thus, the Koppers Industries wood preserving plant is likely to be the only industrial railroad operation remaining in Montgomery at the beginning of the Twenty-First Century.

Thomas R. Lawson, Jr. is the author of Logging Railroads of Alabama,
published by Cabbage Stack Publishing of Birmingham, Alabama.