New location brings new opportunities to the Johnson City Railroad Experience
- appalachianplaces
- 19 hours ago
- 8 min read
Updated: 12 minutes ago
By Ophelia Thornton
For most U.S. towns and cities established during the 1800s, railroads served as critical arteries for creating, growing and sustaining community life. Although establishing and operating those lifelines of 19th century society was particularly challenging in the mountains of Appalachia, parallel steel rails are a common thread connecting the region’s urban centers — to each other, and to the stories of their beginnings.
The Johnson City Railroad Experience is where old stories of a city’s birth are told, now in a new location. What began as the George L. Carter Railroad Museum, housed for 16 years on the campus of East Tennessee State University, has become a centerpiece of tourism development and place-based storytelling.
The museum began looking for a new location when a campus construction project required the demolition of the building that housed the museum. Now located at 207 N. Boone Street, the museum is near the heart of Johnson City’s growing downtown district and more accessible to visitors.
The museum’s namesake, George L. Carter, is responsible for much of the early industrial development of the Tri-Cities area. Carter established the Virginia Iron, Coal, and Coke Company in Bristol, Virginia, in 1899 before forming the Clinchfield Coal Company, most notably associated with the Carolina, Clinchfield, and Ohio Railway that ran through much of Central and Southern Appalachia. “Johnson City’s most iconic features are only there because of George L. Carter,” said Carson Sailor, assistant director of the museum. “The town has a truly unique origin story. It’s not dependent on a fort or a river, but it’s all based around railroad development.”
Fred Alsop, board member and museum director, has been with the museum since its beginnings. Opportunities afforded by the new location, he said, have created a lot of excitement. “We’re much larger, and our mission has changed as well,” Alsop said. “We were open on Saturdays (at the campus location) for about five hours. Parking is a premium during Monday through Friday on a college campus, and this was the only time that people could come to campus and be able to park and find us.”
The new location allows the museum to be open five days a week, with plenty of parking. Railroads featured in the museum ran through Johnson City and played a major role in the construction of its identity and that of the Appalachian region. Jenny Brock, museum board member and Johnson City commissioner, in the focus statement for the museum noted the influence of railroads and the importance of preserving local history. “A city can grow in wealth and population, but its unique heritage is what sets it apart from other cities and adds to a resident's quality of life. The City of Johnson City would not be here but for the railroads and forward-thinking entrepreneurs,” she wrote. “Without protecting our culture by telling the stories of our history, a city just becomes ‘vanilla’ or our culture bends to the ways of others.”
As Johnson City’s population and tourism sector grow, sharing the city’s story has become more important than ever. The number of visitors to Johnson City and Washington County has grown steadily in the past few years, bringing in over $318 million the county during 2023, according to the Tennessee Department of Tourism Development’s most recent Economic Impact report. Johnson City has been working to develop its downtown district, with new businesses popping up along primary corridors, and longtime businesses seeing higher levels of foot traffic. The downtown district hosts about 150 events annually, including festivals that attract vendors from throughout the Tri-Cities region. Officials want to ensure that the people who visit Johnson City leave with an idea of what makes the community special. Making the city’s history accessible and entertaining has been part of that mission.
The train museum consists of rich and detailed exhibits on Johnson City’s nearly 200-year relationship with the railroads. Brenda Whitson, executive director of Visit Johnson City, said that when the Hands on! Discovery Center moved from downtown Johnson City to the Gray Fossil Site & Museum about 20 minutes away in Gray, Tennessee, it left a void for places for families to visit. “We needed a downtown anchor attraction,” Whitson, who is also a railroad museum board member, said. “Without the help of the railroad society and all of the volunteers, it wouldn’t have happened. The museum gives us another element to market to families, but also to those who are railroad and train enthusiasts.”
Visiting train fanatics can find a uniquely immersive experience at the museum
— from those who are passionate about building models, to grandfathers who might have worked the rails at one time, or youngsters who can’t get enough of Thomas the Tank Engine, a familiar face in the museum’s little conductor’s room. With about 200 railroad museums nationwide, enthusiasts come from all walks of life. A 2022 article in The Guardian reveals that music legends Ringo Starr, Phil Collins, and Bruce Springsteen are all hobby modelists. Rod Stewart (known within the model train community as “Rod the Mod”) has a model bigger than many houses.
The Johnson City Railroad Experience partners with Chattanooga’s Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum, the Blue Ridge Scenic Railway in Bryson City, North Carolina, and other museums to offer several excursions on operating vintage trains each year. Visitors to the Railroad Experience can also get a sense of what driving a real train is like. In the museum’s train simulator, visitors control a train trying to get to its next stop on time. Real-time decisions must be made about which way to turn, when to make a stop, and of course, when to blow the whistle.
Upon entering the museum, it’s clear that careful attention to detail is the top priority of model designers. Stories related through particular model pieces, meticulously crafted by museum volunteers, may not be clear at first glance, even to an expert. To call the eye to specific details, the museum offers the choice of taking part in an interactive scavenger hunt, perfect for first-time visitors, students, or anyone wanting to spot features of the models that they may not notice on their own.
Among the models is an expansive replica of the East Tennessee and Western North Carolina Railroad, a narrow-gauge line affectionately known as the Tweetsie, that transported people and goods between Johnson City and Boone, North Carolina. Narrow-gauge railways were the preferred style for mountainous terrain, as the tighter width of the rail line was better for sharp curves and industries such as mining. The museum is expanding the layout to include Johnson City and Elizabethton sections.
The museum’s Tweetsie replica has received national attention, being featured for 11 years in H0n3 Magazine, a yearly model train publication. The Tweetsie ran for just over 30 years, from 1919 to 1950, earning the nickname “the railroad with a heart.” Passengers boarding the Tweetsie had their tickets punched by the conductor, Cy Crumley, with a heart-shaped punch. But the railroad’s famous nickname held significance beyond the punch. The Tweetsie passed through many communities served by dirt roads and far from any grocery store. “The train became the lifeline getting up there to the point that folks would give Cy Crumley a shopping list,” Alsop said. “How many railroads interacted that personally with the people that they served?”
The spirit of the Tweetsie continues to have an impact on the community. The Tweetsie Trail is a walking and biking trail that spans 9.6 miles of the historic railroad bed from Johnson City through Elizabethton. With the trailhead located less than a mile from the museum, visitors can actually “walk the trail after they’ve seen what the line looks like at the railroad museum,” Whitson said. The Tweetsie Trail is also lined with historic markers with information about the railway, the land it was built on, the music it inspired, and nearby historic sites.
Many of the informational markers along the trail are a collaborative effort between the city and ETSU’s Department of Appalachian Studies. Ron Roach, the department’s chair and a museum board member, is deeply familiar with the railroad’s role in the history of the region. “These railroads defied the stereotype of ‘an isolated Appalachia,’” he said. “Even those who lived in the hollers were just a day away from towns, thanks to the trains.”
The Department of Appalachian Studies’ collaboration with the museum is long-standing. Before moving downtown, and before its most recent campus home, the museum began as an exhibit in the basement of ETSU’s B. Carroll Reece Museum, a unit of the Center of Excellence for Appalachian Studies and Services. Roach has taught an Appalachian community-engagement course that allows students to capture the histories of local railroads through interviews with railroad workers. “You can’t study the history of Appalachia without considering the history of the railroad,” he said. “The railroad’s had an extraordinary influence on the development of the region, both culturally and commercially. Our department is proud to partner with the JCRE to preserve this important history and heritage.”
While the real Appalachian mountains required half a billion years to form, volunteers who painstakingly worked to replicate them inside the Johnson City Railroad Experience invested quite a lot of time as well. Geological features are carefully reproduced with rubber molds, piece by piece. Model mountains were painted using a technique aimed at achieving and authentic old-growth appearance. “We put it together like a mosaic, like a stained-glass window,” Alsop said. “We try to make it look natural to the naked eye.” Trees, too, are features that must be given careful attention to make the scene look realistic. To add perspective, larger trees are added nearer to the rails, while smaller, less detailed “puffball trees” are placed as the mountain slopes upward.
Many details in the models are placed for realism, but some represent narratives about how deeply the railway was ingrained in the lives of nearby residents. In one section of the East Tennessee and Western North Carolina model, a family of five is standing beside the tracks outside the Hopson Post Office. The scene is based on a photograph taken by a train conductor in 1905. On the rightmost side, a girl in a red coat stands on a raised platform. The girl is Gladys Lacey Jones, who is on record as the first woman in Carter County to become a licensed car owner. When Gladys was 105, she visited ETSU and saw the figurine based on her in the photograph. Because the photo was in black and white, model designers chose to depict her wearing a blue coat. Gladys remembered that the coat she wore on that day nearly a century before had been red. The coat for the figurine was promptly changed to red.
From expertly crafted models, to exhibits on local women in the railroad, to hobo-signs scavenger hunts, both enthusiasts and casual museum goers can certainly expect something to pique their interest at the Johnson City Railroad Experience. Railroads are central to Johnson City’s history, and still provide a rumbling daily presence downtown and beyond. There are restored train stops, repurposed depot buildings, and now a railroad museum in the downtown district welcoming all who pass through to imagine a bustling railroad town of the century past.
“The best part is seeing people who wouldn't usually be into it interact with a community space — something all museums should be,” Sailor said. “There’s truly something here for everybody.”
The Johnson City Railroad Experience is open Tuesday-Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. On May 30-31, the museum is hosting its annual Big Train Show in the Ballad Health Athletic Center (Mini Dome) at East Tennessee State University, one of the largest train shows in the southeastern United States. For more information, visit the museum website at johnsoncityrailroadexperience.org.
Ophelia Thornton is a student in the Master’s in Appalachian Studies program at East Tennessee State University, and an assistant editor for Appalachian Places. She holds a master’s degree in Secondary English Education and has taught history in Tennessee public schools.
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