The Glasgow Railway (formally, the Glasgow Railway Company, Inc.) is an American

short-line railroad :''Short Line is also one of the four railroads in the American version of the popular board game Monopoly, named after the Shore Fast Line, an interurban streetcar line.'' A shortline railroad is a small or mid-sized railroad company that oper ...

whose line runs from

Park City Park City may refer to: a city in Utah. Places * National Park City, London, England, UK; see parks and open spaces in London in the United States * Park City, Illinois * Park City, Kansas * Park City, Kentucky * Park City, Montana * Park City, ...

Glasgow, Kentucky Glasgow is a home rule-class city in Barren County, Kentucky, United States. It is the seat of its county. Glasgow is the principal city of the Glasgow micropolitan area, which comprises Barren and Metcalfe counties. The population was 14,028 ...

. Though independently owned by the Robert Lessenberry family of Glasgow, the line is operated under long-term lease by

CSX Transportation CSX Transportation , known colloquially as simply CSX, is a Class I freight railroad operating in the Eastern United States and the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec. The railroad operates approximately 21,000 route miles () of track. ...

, as corporate successor to the

Louisville and Nashville Railroad The Louisville and Nashville Railroad , commonly called the L&N, was a Class I railroad that operated freight and passenger services in the southeast United States. Chartered by the Commonwealth of Kentucky in 1850, the road grew into one of the ...

. As such, the company has no

locomotive A locomotive or engine is a rail transport vehicle that provides the Power (physics), motive power for a train. If a locomotive is capable of carrying a payload, it is usually rather referred to as a multiple unit, Motor coach (rail), motor ...

s or operable

rolling stock The term rolling stock in the rail transport industry refers to railway vehicles, including both powered and unpowered vehicles: for example, locomotives, freight and passenger cars (or coaches), and non-revenue cars. Passenger vehicles can b ...

, and apparently has no

reporting mark A reporting mark is a code used to identify owners or lessees of rolling stock and other equipment used on certain rail transport networks. The code typically reflects the name or identifying number of the owner, lessee, or operator of the equip ...

assigned to it. The Glasgow Railway connects its namesake city with the former L&N's namesake main line at Park City, which itself was formerly named Glasgow Junction.

History

The line began as the

Barren County Barren County is a county located in the south-central portion of the U.S. state of Kentucky. As of the 2020 census, the population was 44,485. Its county seat is Glasgow. The county was founded on December 20, 1798, from parts of Warren and ...

Railroad Company, and was built in 1856, with the intention of connecting with the L&N, then itself under construction. According to Lessenberry, county leaders raised taxes to fund the line, which angered resident of the eastern portion of the county. That portion seceded and eventually became part of neighboring Metcalfe County. That company was sold to three local businessmen, including prominent attorney William Logan Porter, in 1868 and renamed the Glasgow Railroad Company. The men later sold the line to the Glasgow Railway Company in 1899.

Current

The only surviving rolling stock of the Glasgow Railway is passenger car 109, which is one of only a handful of such cars in a

Jim Crow The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws enforcing racial segregation in the Southern United States. Other areas of the United States were affected by formal and informal policies of segregation as well, but many states outside the Sout ...

configuration remaining in existence. The car is in an advanced state of decay, despite various efforts to save it over the years, and sat on a siding near the line's terminus in Glasgow for decades. In 2011, the car was moved to

The Historic Railpark and Train Museum The Historic Railpark and Train Museum, formerly the Louisville and Nashville Railroad Station in Bowling Green, Kentucky, is located in the historic railroad station. The building was placed on the National Register of Historic Places on Decemb ...

in nearby

Bowling Green A bowling green is a finely laid, close-mown and rolled stretch of turf for playing the game of bowls. Before 1830, when Edwin Beard Budding of Thrupp, near Stroud, UK, invented the lawnmower, lawns were often kept cropped by grazing sheep ...

, where efforts are underway to restore the car. It was used on the daily (sometimes twice-daily) mixed train that ran from Glasgow to the L&N connection. The line is freight-only, serving numerous factories in Glasgow. It once used a ramp for

piggyback Piggyback, piggy-back, or piggybacking may mean: Transport * Piggyback (transportation), something that is riding on the back of something else Art, entertainment, and media * Splash cymbal piggybacking, mounting a cymbal on top of an already ...

service, whose main customer was a local moving company; the ramp was literally the end of the line, adjacent to a city street. The only structure on the line is the

freight station A goods station (also known as a goods yard or goods depot) or freight station is, in the widest sense, a railway station where, either exclusively or predominantly, goods (or freight), such as merchandise, parcels, and manufactured items, are lo ...

at Glasgow. A

passenger station A train station, railway station, railroad station or depot is a railway facility where trains stop to load or unload passengers, freight or both. It generally consists of at least one platform, one track and a station building providing such ...

was once located at the community of Oil City. For a brief period in the 1990s, the Glasgow Railway hosted a

tourist train ''Tourist Train'' (Italian: ''Treno popolare'') is a 1933 Italian comedy film directed by Raffaello Matarazzo and starring Marcello Spada, Lina Gennari and Carlo Petrangeli. The film portrays the comic adventures of a group of summertime traveller ...

using an

EMD SD9 An SD9 is a 6-axle diesel locomotive built by General Motors Electro-Motive Division between January 1954 and June 1959. An EMD 567C 16-cylinder engine generated . Externally similar to its predecessor, the SD7, the SD9 was built with the improv ...

locomotive that was notable for being specially ballasted for use on the steep grade at

Madison, Indiana Madison is a city in and the county seat of Jefferson County, Indiana, United States, along the Ohio River. As of the 2010 United States Census its population was 11,967. Over 55,000 people live within of downtown Madison. Madison is the larges ...

on the former

Pennsylvania Railroad The Pennsylvania Railroad (reporting mark PRR), legal name The Pennsylvania Railroad Company also known as the "Pennsy", was an American Class I railroad that was established in 1846 and headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was named ...

(now the

Madison Railroad The Madison Railroad , a division of the City of Madison Port Authority, is a short-line railroad in southeastern Indiana. The Madison Railroad begins along the Ohio River in the western part of the city of Madison and from there runs generally ...

References

*{{val rep, The Glasgow Railway Company, 405, 39, V, 816, year=1932, intlink=Glasgow Railway Kentucky railroads Railway companies established in 1856 Transportation in Barren County, Kentucky Glasgow, Kentucky 1856 establishments in Kentucky