Carolina Central Railroad
defunct railroad in North Carolina
The Carolina Central Railroad, was a railway company in the United States. It was incorporated in 1855 as the Wilmington and Charlotte Railroad and was renamed the Wilmington, Charlotte and Rutherford Railroad shortly after. It was reorganized as the Carolina Central Railway in 1873. It built 152 miles (245 km) of track, in two unconnected sections, in the southern part of North Carolina. The company was again reorganized as the Carolina Central Railroad in 1880. In 1900, the Carolina Central Railroad was merged into the Seaboard Air Line Railroad. Its lines are now owned by CSX Transportation.
History
Formation and early years
The Wilmington and Charlotte Railroad was incorporated on February 13, 1855, but the name was changed soon after to the Wilmington, Charlotte and Rutherford Railroad. The company intended to build a railway line from Wilmington, North Carolina, on the Atlantic Ocean, to Rutherford County, North Carolina, via Charlotte, North Carolina.
The company completed a 112-mile (180 km) line from Navassa, outside Wilmington, to Rockingham, in 1861.
“Carolina Central Railroad” enters the record as defunct railroad in North Carolina. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Carolina, Central and Railroad can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 27, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q115805778. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1855, 1873, 1880 and 1900.
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This entry incorporates text from “Carolina Central Railroad” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.