Pensacola and Atlantic Railroad
The Pensacola and Atlantic Railroad was a company incorporated by an act of the Florida Legislature on March 4, 1881, to run from Pensacola to the Apalachicola River near Chattahoochee, a distance of about. No railroad had ever been built across the sparsely populated panhandle of Florida, which left Pensacola isolated from the rest of the state. William D. Chipley and Frederick R. De Funiak, both of whom are commemorated in the names of towns later built along the P&A line, were among the founding officers of the railroad company.
Chipley was general manager of the Pensacola Railroad,. The Pensacola Railroad connected Pensacola with the large, prosperous Louisville and Nashville Railroad at Pollard, Alabama, about northward. The Pensacola Railroad had become a subsidiary of the L&N on October 20, 1880. It was Chipley, a tireless promoter of his adopted city, who was responsible for initiating discussions with the L&N concerning its extension into the Florida Panhandle. De Funiak was general manager of the L&N.
Once the P&A was created, De Funiak was named president of the new road, and Chipley became its vice president and general superintendent. On May 9, 1881, the L&N obtained control of the P&A by purchasing the majority of its $3 million worth of capital stock and all of its bonds, also valued at $3 million. Construction was completed in 1883, and in 1891 the P&A was absorbed into the L&N, operating thereafter as the P&A Division of the latter. After various mergers, CSX Railroad operated the line from 1986 to 2019 as its P&A Subdivision.
The line remains in service today as part of the Florida Gulf & Atlantic Railroad, which bought the line and took over operations on June 1, 2019. CSX retained ownership of the line from milepost 651.0 to milepost 645.0, and has trackage rights over the FG&A.
History
Construction
After the L&N took control, construction proceeded rapidly, beginning on June 1, 1881, and was completed in 22 months. By April 1882, "2,278 men were engaged in grading, cutting cross-ties, piling and bridging, and laying track."In May a locomotive, rolling stock, and rails were shipped by barge across the Pensacola Bay and up the Blackwater River to Milton, about east of Pensacola, to enable construction to proceed eastward from there. Similar supplies and equipment were also landed by barge on the east bank of the Choctawhatchee River near present-day Caryville, and at Sampson's Landing on the west bank of the Apalachicola just below Chattahoochee.
Bids were submitted by local and out-of-state contractors who undertook the construction work in sections along the line, including H. S. Harris for the section from Milton to the Shoal River, near present-day Crestview; Sam Baker of Thomasville, Georgia for a section west of the Choctawhatchee; the McClendon Construction Company, also of Thomasville, for the from the Choctawhatchee to Marianna; and John T. Howard of Quincy, Florida for the from Marianna to the Apalachicola.
Both white and black laborers from the Panhandle as well as adjoining parts of Alabama and Georgia were recruited to build the track and bridges. After some disputes among competing groups of laborers, wages were set at $1.50 a day for all workers.
Delays were caused by outbreaks of swamp fever all along the line, causing many men to fall ill; no medical help was available in the very thinly settled section between Milton and Marianna. When a bridge contractor from Macon, Georgia, died from the fever, his body had to be carried by wagon on a journey of several days from the work camp at the Choctawhatchee River to Troy, Alabama, the nearest point served by a railroad connection to Macon, for shipment to his hometown for burial. Nevertheless, despite all the difficulties of working in such an isolated region, with no repair shops and a largely inexperienced work crew, construction proceeded at a rapid pace.
Wooden depots were built by the P&A at Milton and Marianna, the only towns of any size in the Panhandle at that time; in other localities along the route, boxcars parked on sidings served as temporary depots. After a trestle across Escambia Bay from Pensacola was completed, official groundbreaking ceremonies were held in Pensacola on August 22, 1882, at the new Pensacola and Atlantic depot at the corner of Tarragona and Wright streets. This two-story wooden structure was replaced in 1912 by a larger L&N passenger station of brick and stucco, at the corner of Wright and Alcaniz.
By February 1883, the line was completed to the Apalachicola River and a bridge was completed over the river in April. Until the bridge was completed, for several weeks passengers were ferried across the Apalachicola by boat.
Local reaction
The recollections of J. D. Smith of Thomasville, Georgia, who at age 19 hired out as a foreman on the crew building westward from Marianna, were published in a 1926 issue of the L&N Employees' Magazine:I was surprised to find in Jackson County, fertile lands, and the country around Marianna inhabited with old-line Southern farmers, a people of the highest type of civilization, operating many large plantations, at that time snow-white for miles and miles along the public roads, with hundreds of negroes picking and ginning it for market. The banks of the Chattahoochee River were covered with hundreds of bales of cotton that could not be moved by the steamboats as the water was very low.... Much money was lost by the planters on account of long delays in shipping their cotton up the Chattahoochee River to Columbus, Ga., waiting on rains to raise the river.
The people and at Marianna came out to question us about the railroad. They had been fooled for so many years by promises made to give them a railroad that they seemed to have no confidence in the project being carried out. I assured them they would now have a railroad, that the Old Reliable L&N was behind the move and we would build the railroad very quickly. People were rejoicing everywhere at the thought of this wonderful improvement....
After reaching a point where Cottondale is now situated, we passed the place where civilization existed.... From that point on westward the railroad did not go near a single house until it reached Milton.... It was amusing to see the people coming from distant shacks to see the construction going on. The majority of these people had no conception of what a train looked like. Some thought it had life. They even asked me if a train could get in the door of a man's house. However, these were settlements of uninformed people living away from the railroad....
Track gauge
The line was built to gauge, as was common for Southern railroads of the time, including the L&N, and used 50-pound steel rail. Completed main-line trackage was, with sidings totaling. On May 30, 1886, the Louisville and Nashville changed the gauge of all its lines to in a one-day system-wide effort requiring the labor of about 8,000 men from dawn to dusk. Ten years later, in a more gradual effort, the system changed to the.Locomotives
The Pensacola and Atlantic owned at least 13 locomotives, numbered 1–13, which it bought from the L&N. Ten of these, which were returned to the L&N in 1891, were the 4-4-0 American or eight-wheeler type, including four built by Rogers in 1882. L&N records also show that six 4-4-0's bought by the P&A in 1881-82 had originally belonged to the Mobile and Montgomery Railway, which was acquired by the L&N in 1881.Running through a region of plentiful timber, the P&A used wood-burning locomotives until well after 1900, when the rest of the L&N system had long since converted to coal-burners.
Railroad connections
Through service from Pensacola to the state capital at Tallahassee and on to the Atlantic Ocean port and major rail junction of Jacksonville began during the first week in May 1883, via the connection at River Junction with the Jacksonville, Pensacola and Mobile Railroad, later the Florida Central and Peninsular Railroad, a predecessor of the Seaboard Air Line Railroad.Another trade and transportation link for Northwest Florida was provided by a branch of the Savannah, Florida and Western Railroad from Chattahoochee to Climax, Georgia and thence to Savannah from Pensacola, which, like Jacksonville, was an important ocean port and railroad junction for rail traffic on the eastern seaboard. Before the railroad was built, the only way for Pensacola rail traffic to reach Savannah or Jacksonville was by a long, circuitous route via Montgomery and Macon.
In the opposite direction, the P&A offered a through route for shipping and travel from southern Georgia and from central and southern Florida via the Louisville and Nashville to the ports and rail hubs of Mobile and New Orleans, and from there to Texas and points west.
The P&A acquired the Pensacola and Fort Barrancas Railroad in 1882.
In 1894, sawmill operator W. B. Wright opened the Yellow River Railroad between Crestview and Florala, Alabama via Auburn, Campton, and Laurel Hill. The L&N supplied the line with freight cars, and in 1906, purchased the operation.
In the first two decades of the 20th century, the P&A Division was crossed or connected to by several small regional railroads, including the Atlanta and St. Andrew's Bay Railway, the Apalachicola Northern Railroad, and the Marianna and Blountstown Railroad. The Choctawhatchee and Northern Railroad was chartered in February 1927 to build a line from a point on the L&N east of Crestview south to Port Dixie on the Choctawhatchee Bay, but was never built. In the 1920s and 1930s, the short-lived Alabama and Western Florida Railway connected with the line at Chipley, Florida. The Marianna and Blountstown Railroad connected with the P&A at Marianna, Florida from 1909 to 1972.
An abandoned military railroad in Louisiana was moved to the Eglin Air Force Base reservation after World War II, connecting with the L&N at Mossy Head. This line, known as the Eglin Air Force Base Railroad, went into service on 1 February 1952 and was abandoned in the late 1970s.
In the later 20th century, the P&A route was used by L&N's Gulf Wind and Amtrak's Sunset Limited. As a result of various railroad mergers and acquisitions between 1967 and 1986, CSX Transportation was the successor railroad that owned and operated the route for freight service as the P&A Subdivision of the Jacksonville Division of CSX from 1986 to 2019. CSX sold the P&A route to the Class III shortline Florida Gulf & Atlantic Railroad, which commenced operations on June 1, 2019.
U.S. Highway 90 and Interstate 10 run generally parallel to the P&A route across Northwest Florida, usually to the south of the railroad and sometimes adjacent to it.