© Copyright 1999 James David Pearce

Between the era of river-boat traffic and the days of the automobiles, there was a period when railroads ruled.

And there were all kinds of railroads. Inside cities such as Norfolk they had trolleys, usually propelled by electricity over small, narrow tracks. Between the larger towns – Rocky Mount to Norfolk – they had standard-gauge trains with large, comfortable cars and big steam engines.

And for people who needed transportation connections in rural areas such as central and upper Bertie County, they had the "Walk and Push."

The Atlantic Coast Line Railroad built a main line from New York to Miami. To this, they soon added a spur line from Rocky Mount to Norfolk that went through the crossroads hamlets of Ahoskie, Aulander, Cofield and Tunis at the turn of the century.

That railroad race toward the big time bypassed much of Bertie County, and the farmers and small merchants of the villages there were overjoyed at the arrival on the scene of the Wellington and Powellsville Railroad, a narrow-gauge line connecting Windsor to Ahoskie and the ACL main lines.

The little train that ran over this line during the early part of the 1900s was highly popular with the general public as well as farmers and businessmen who had to move merchandise and produce. It offered a path of escape for country people who had been harnessed too long to too small an acreage.

Not only could you connect at Ahoskie for a ride to Norfolk, but you could go the other way to Rocky Mount and if you had money and time enough you then could head north to the world's capital – New York – or south to the lowland savannahs of South Carolina and Georgia and the swamps and sunshine of Florida.

If you didn't have the funds or the time for that, you could always ride through the central Bertie countryside on Sunday afternoon lunch-basket "excursions" to Windsor itself, a pre-Revolutionary War town with streets named "King" and "Queen," and a river all its own. The Cashie, a 30-mile stream that begins and ends in Bertie territory, is a particularly beautiful piece of sinuous blackwater that offers numerous soothing riverside picnic and fishing havens as it winds slowly through the historic old town 25 miles from Ahoskie.

As soon as the Wellington and Powellsville put its circled "W&P" logo on the side of its pony engine, fuel car, baggage, freight and passenger cars, it came to be known affectionately as the "Walk and Push" – for its slow rate of travel, not because riders actually had to lend a hand as the old legends insist.

But the "Walk and Push," which had evolved from a sawmill's lowly logging train, couldn't mix with the big boys. When passengers from Bertie County reached the main line at Ahoskie, they had to get off and re-load themselves and their merchandise onto the bigger, wide-gauge ACL cars.

To facilitate this maneuver, the "Walk and Push" terminal in Ahoskie, on the wrong side of the bigger tracks across from No-Man's Land and the Coast Line station, had a curving set of rails that wound up running parallel to the ACL line for a hundred yards or so. The smaller cars were pushed along this parallel line until they were almost touching the bigger cars, themselves on a spur of the main line.

It then was a small task to drop a couple of connecting planks between the baggage and freight cars and transfer the payload for shipment east, west, north or south.

The under-size train wobbled along merrily behind its little steam engine for many years, carrying farm produce and manufactured merchandise and bringing smiles to children and adults as it huffed and puffed its way through the fields.

It ran into some hard times during the Depression years, like all the rest of the Eastern Carolina farm country, and the main passenger service was discontinued when it became the property of other railroad men and operated under the name "Carolina Southern." But for some time after that, provision was made for casual passenger seating in the baggage and mail car, and more primitive seating in some of the freight cars.

The "Walk and Push" was a long time surrendering to the onslaught of autos, trucks and paved highways.

Like a lot of things that grow old and out of their time, it just gradually withered away, until one day we looked around and there was nothing there but memories, not even the little, narrow tracks.

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Old map of Bertie County (1895 US Atlas) shows origins of W&P line

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Narrow-gauge engine
similar to the W&P

photo © 1998 Erik Ledbetter

The Last Coal Road
Pennsylvania's East Broad Top

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Gary Pearce, toy jet, baggage cart
and switch engine, c. 1953

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Editor's note: When the author wrote the foregoing, he neglected to note anything at all about the railroading history of another section of BIG Bertie County ~ the Far Northwest, wherein rests Kelford (and Roxobel). The reason he failed to mention it was that he knew absolutely nothing about it. He would like to cover that omission now, and inform readers that they can click the following URL and learn all about Kelford and its page in railroading history:

Laying tracks to Kelford

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To learn EVERYTHING about the old ACL and SAL, click here