East End District

The East End District is a busy line in the Norfolk Southern Railway's Alabama Division. The line stretches 148 miles from Austell, Georgia, outside Atlanta toward Birmingham. It is part of the Amtrak Crescent passenger train's route between New Orleans, Louisiana and New York, New York.

In Georgia the track connects to Norfolk Southern's Cedartown District in Bremen, Georgia. That line is used primarily to haul coal and other bulk materials and serves two large Georgia Power plants.

In Alabama the line proceeds through Heflin, Oxford and Anniston, along the southern edge of the Anniston Army Depot, through downtown Pell City and Leeds to Norris Yards in Irondale, and then on through eastern Birmingham as far as Sloss Furnaces.

In Birmingham, the East End District line makes connections to the AGS South District at Woodlawn Junction and just south of Sloss Furnaces.

The line originated as the route of the Georgia Pacific Railway which was chartered in 1881 to run westbound from Atlanta down to Texarkana, Texas. The easternmost section, reaching as far as Birmingham, opened in November 1883. Construction was not continued after the road reached Greenville, Mississippi in 1887.

The line, controlled by the Richmond Terminal, was formally acquired by the Southern Railway before 1895. It became part of the Norfolk Southern sytem with the merger of the Southern with the Norfolk & Western Railway in 1982.