The Cass Scenic Railroad: Logging Lines Still Running
Near Snowshoe, West Virginia
About eight miles southeast of Snowshoe Mountain, the little town of Cass holds one of West Virginia's finest preservation stories. Cass was built entirely by the West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company around nineteen hundred: a company town with a company store, company houses in graded rows, and a massive sawmill on the Greenbrier River. The heart of the operation was a logging railroad that climbed Cheat Mountain using a type of locomotive called a Shay engine, built with gears and cranks that gave it the traction to push heavy timber loads up grades that would stop a conventional locomotive cold.
When the last log came down in nineteen sixty and the mill closed, Cass faced the fate of most company towns. Instead, the state of West Virginia stepped in. The state purchased the railroad in the early nineteen sixties, including eleven miles of surviving track, the repair shops, and four Shay locomotives.
The Cass Scenic Railroad began carrying passengers up those same steep grades the very next year. Today the old Shay engines still haul open-air excursion cars up through the recovering spruce forest, past the ruins of old logging camps, to a high overlook where the mountains roll away toward Virginia. It is the logging railroad that outlasted the loggers, and one of the few places in the East where you can watch a geared steam locomotive climb a genuine mountain grade.
