Railroad
spur lines connected Lookout Mountain ore mines to valley furnaces. The
railroad which was eventually known as the Tennessee, Alabama and Georgia
Rail Line (TAG Rail Lines) was originally chartered as the Chattanooga
Southern Railroad in Georgia in 1887 and in Alabama in 1890. The line went
bankrupt and was reorganized in 1895 and again in 1902. In 1890 Colonel
Woolsey Finnell, in charge of a surveying party laying out the railroad
through Shinbone Valley, visited the Little River Canyon and remarked,
"Why
go to Colorado to see the Royal Gorge...Little River Gorge is much longer,
more rugged and almost as deep as the Royal Gorge. It is far more scenic."
Colonel
Finnell ran the railroad about a mile from the southern end of the gorge
or canyon. According to a local historian, the "new" railroad was known
locally as the "Pigeon Mountain route."
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showed a white pigeon flying across the mouth of a tunnel going through
Pigeon Mountain which is located in Georgia. This scenic route which ran
the length of Lookout Mountain from Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Gadsden,
Alabama, was renamed the Tennessee, Alabama and Georgia Railroad in 1911.
Sometime between 1930 and 1951, the TAG Rail Line discontinued passenger
service and operated a small gasoline motor car, the "Scooter," to haul
passengers and mail. In 1971, the line was purchased by the Southern Railway
System and segments were abandoned in the 1980's.
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