The Atlantic Coast Line Railroad (reporting mark ACL) was an American railroad from 1900 until 1967, when it merged with the Seaboard Air Line Railroad, its long-time rival, to form the Seaboard Coast Line Railroad. Much of the original ACL network has been part of CSX Transportation since 1986.
The Atlantic Coast Line served the Southeast, with a concentration of lines in Florida. Numerous named passenger trains were operated by the railroad for Florida-bound tourists, with the Atlantic Coast Line contributing significantly to Florida's economic development in the first half of the 20th century.
At the end of 1925 ACL operated 4924 miles of road, not including its flock of subsidiaries; after some merging, mileage at the end of 1960 was 5570 not including A&WP, CN&L, East Carolina, Georgia, Rockingham, and V&CS. In 1960 ACL reported 10623 million net ton-miles of revenue freight and 490 million passenger-miles.
Read more about Atlantic Coast Line Railroad: In Popular Culture
Famous quotes containing the words atlantic, coast, line and/or railroad:
“In clear weather the laziest may look across the Bay as far as Plymouth at a glance, or over the Atlantic as far as human vision reaches, merely raising his eyelids; or if he is too lazy to look after all, he can hardly help hearing the ceaseless dash and roar of the breakers. The restless ocean may at any moment cast up a whale or a wrecked vessel at your feet. All the reporters in the world, the most rapid stenographers, could not report the news it brings.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The Boston papers had never told me that there were seals in the harbor. I had always associated these with the Esquimaux and other outlandish people. Yet from the parlor windows all along the coast you may see families of them sporting on the flats. They were as strange to me as the merman would be. Ladies who never walk in the woods, sail over the sea. To go to sea! Why, it is to have the experience of Noah,—to realize the deluge. Every vessel is an ark.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Gascoigne, Ben Jonson, Greville, Raleigh, Donne,
Poets who wrote great poems, one by one,
And spaced by many years, each line an act
Through which few labor, which no men retract.
This passion is the scholar’s heritage,”
—Yvor Winters (1900–1968)
“... no other railroad station in the world manages so mysteriously to cloak with compassion the anguish of departure and the dubious ecstasies of return and arrival. Any waiting room in the world is filled with all this, and I have sat in many of them and accepted it, and I know from deliberate acquaintance that the whole human experience is more bearable at the Gare de Lyon in Paris than anywhere else.”
—M.F.K. Fisher (1908–1992)