NASA Railroad

The NASA Railroad (reporting mark NLAX) is a Class III industrial short-line railroad at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The railroad consists of 38 miles (61 km) of track connecting the mainline of the Florida East Coast Railway and trackage at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. NASA uses the railroad to deliver large or bulk materials to support its operations, particularly solid rocket boosters and chemicals such as helium and oxygen for rocket fuel.

History

In 1963, the Florida East Coast Railway (FEC) constructed a 7.5 miles (12.1 km) branch from its mainline to the Kennedy Space Center just north of Titusville. This connection joined 28 miles of NASA-constructed track at a junction named Wilson's Corners. The FEC built two yards, a seven-track yard originally called Cape Canaveral Junction (now known as Jay Jay Yard), and a second seven-track yard called Wilson Yard. East of Wilson Yard, the line divided with the nine-mile "West Leg" branch going south to NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building and the Kennedy Space Center Industrial Area, and the other nine-mile "East Leg" branch which ran along the Atlantic Ocean to serve launch pads 39A and 39B, as well as to interchange with the former Cape Canaveral Air Force Station railroad.

During its first five years of operation, the railroad delivered over 30,000 carloads of aggregate that was used to construct the crawlerway that connected the Vehicle Assembly Building to the launch pads at LC-39. During the Apollo program, the railroad regularly transported the 56 carloads of propellant that was required to fuel each Saturn V rocket and even ferried Apollo astronauts to an area known as "The Sandpile," which was used as a lunar testing ground. During the late 1970s, as NASA transitioned from the Apollo to the Space Shuttle program, it acquired three World War II-era ex-U.S Army ALCO S-2 locomotives, which provided local switching around the Vehicle Assembly Building and within the KSC Industrial Area.