Spencer: The World's Biggest Locomotive Shop

Spencer exists because of one calculation: this spot is almost exactly halfway between Atlanta and Washington on the Southern Railway main line, which made it the ideal place to overhaul steam locomotives. The Southern Railway opened its repair shops here in August of eighteen ninety-six and named them for company president Samuel Spencer. The town incorporated around the shops in nineteen oh five.

At their peak in the late nineteen forties, the Spencer Shops were the largest steam locomotive repair facility on the Southern Railway in the Southeast, employing as many as three thousand workers. When diesels made steam obsolete, the shops declined. The shops stopped working on steam locomotives in nineteen fifty-three.

The state of North Carolina eventually rescued the site and turned it into the North Carolina Transportation Museum, where the vast roundhouse and back shop still stand, along with more than fifty pieces of rolling stock.