The Tallulah Falls Railway Museum 

 The Tallulah Falls Railroad's predecessor The Blue Ridge & Atlantic Railroad was sold under foreclosure in 1897. The Tallulah Falls Railroad was organized the next year to take over its properties. With the financial backing of the Southern Railway, the new owners extended the line to Clayton GA in 1904, to North Carolina in 1906, and then to Franklin in 1907. The result was a 58-mile line from Cornelia GA to Franklin NC. 

 Around the time that the railroad was under construction north of Clayton, the Southern was considering a grander plan, one which would incorporate the TF and several other existing lines into a new route over the Appalachians to Knoxville, Tennessee. 

  If constructed, the railroad would have continued from Franklin down the Little Tennessee River valley to Southern's Murphy Branch (Asheville-to-Murphy, N.C.) near Almond. From there, trains could proceed a few miles to Bushnell where the Tennessee & Carolina Southern branched off and followed the river 14 miles to Fontana. From Fontana, new tracks would be built alongside the Little Tennessee to Calderwood, where they would join existing lines to Maryville and Knoxville. The plan was never implemented.

In 1917 the TF reported operating 58 miles of rail line between           Cornelia  and Franklin with 5.72 miles of sidings. The list of equipment reported included 5 locomotives, 10 passenger cars , 46 freight cars, and 6 service cars.

 The TF’s nickname was the Rabun Gap Route. (Although some local       people jokingly called it the "Total Failure.")

Passenger service, sparsely patronized since the 1920s, ended abruptly in May of 1946, when a truck struck a train at a crossing, doing $100 worth of damage to the locomotive, and shattering windows onto passengers in the single 1914 vintage passenger car in service.

 The railroad was "dieselized" in 1948. A stable of venerable, mostly Baldwin steamers were replaced with two small boxy utilitarian GE 70-ton road switchers. This removed much of the remaining romance from the mountain line, but reduced locomotive-related operating expenses from $90/day to approximately $20/day. A self-powered diesel-electric unit continued to be used as a Railway Post Office and Railway Express Agency facility into the 1950s, presumably until mail service on the railroad ceased in 1954.

 The last freight train ran on March 25, 1961. A short section from Cornelia to Demorest remained in operation for several years longer, but was abandoned sometime before 1985. In 1950, the failing railroad gained recognition as a movie location. The 1950 film "I'd Climb the Highest Mountain" brought steam engine # 75 out of retirement for railroad scenes during the opening credits that included shots of the train crossing the massive Tallulah Falls trestle.

 Then in 1956 Walt Disney used the railroad to film "The Great Locomotive Chase" starring Fess Parker and Jeffrey Hunter, with authentic Civil War period locomotives and rolling stock borrowed from the B&O Railroad's museum and other collections. It was based on the true 1862 story of "Andrews Raiders" mission to cut the Confederacy's vital Marietta-Chattanooga rail line, which was and is still in operation and much too busy to be tied up for a movie shoot, as well as too modernized to be authentic. The TF was chosen in large part because most of its structures were still of 19th century design. A number of locals were recruited as extras and even given minor speaking parts, including the then mayor of Clayton.