Southern Railway's Spencer Shops were a major steam locomotive repair facility between Atlanta and Washington, D.C. in Spencer, North Carolina. The service facility was once Southern Railway's largest steam locomotive repair center. The period of greatest prosperity and productivity for the facility was in the first half of the twentieth century.
These type of repair service facilities for the railroads were called "back shops". They were located in every division of a railroad system and centralized for the most extensive kinds of repairs. The Spencer Shops "back shops" were named in honor of the first president of the Southern Railway, Samuel Spencer (1847 – 1906), as was the name of the new town developed for these facilities.
The original buildings included a machine shop, storehouse building, office building, wood working shop, and a combination smith and boiler shop. It even had a power plant, an automobile repair facility, and a 37-bay roundhouse where locomotives could be worked on. It employed between 2500 and 3000 at any one time.
The Spencer Shops were located near Salisbury, North Carolina. The conversion from steam locomotives to diesel locomotives caused the demise of the Spencer Shops. They were phased out from the 1950s to the 1970s. The former Spencer Shops complex is now part of the North Carolina Transportation Museum.
Read more about Southern Railway's Spencer Shops: History, Town of Spencer
Famous quotes containing the words southern, railway, spencer and/or shops:
“Archaeologists have uncovered six-thousand-year-old clay tablets from southern Babylonia that describe in great detail how the adults of that community found the younger generation to be insolent and disobedient.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)
“Her personality had an architectonic quality; I think of her when I see some of the great London railway termini, especially St. Pancras, with its soot and turrets, and she overshadowed her own daughters, whom she did not understand—my mother, who liked things to be nice; my dotty aunt. But my mother had not the strength to put even some physical distance between them, let alone keep the old monster at emotional arm’s length.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)
“Guilt pins a fig-leaf; Innocence is its own adorning.”
—Anne Spencer (1882–1975)
“Americans are fascinated by their own love of shopping. This does not make them unique. It’s just that they have more to buy than most other people on the planet. And it’s also an affirmation of faith in their country, its prosperity and limitless bounty. They have shops the way that lesser countries have statues.”
—Simon Hoggart (b. 1946)