History
The Kentucky Improvement Company was chartered in December 1866 and renamed January 1, 1870 to the Eastern Kentucky Railway. The first section, from Riverton south to Argillite, opened in 1867. Further extensions took it to Hunnewell by 1870, Grayson in 1871, Willard by 1874 and Webbville in 1889. At Hitchins, between Grayson and Willard, the line junctioned with the Elizabethtown, Lexington and Big Sandy Railroad, an east-west branch of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway.
The Consolidated Southern Railway was a plan in the 1880s to extend the EK south as part of a through line to Hickory and Statesville, North Carolina, also using the never-built Norfolk and Cincinnati Railroad and part of the Chester and Lenoir Railroad.
The EK went bankrupt in 1919, and the part south of Grayson was reorganized in 1928 as the Eastern Kentucky Southern Railway. That company stopped operations in January 1933, and the tracks were removed soon after.
The EK is featured in the children's book A Ride with Huey, the Engineer (1966) by Jesse Stuart.
Due out in September 2007 will be the book "Eastern Kentucky Railway" by Terry L. Baldridge.
Read more about this topic: Eastern Kentucky Railway
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.”
—Henry James (1843–1916)
“There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)