Murphy Branch

The historically important Murphy Branch is the westernmost part of what was the Western North Carolina Railroad, later the Richmond and Danville, Southern Railway, the Norfolk Southern Railway (NS) and today the Blue Ridge Southern Railroad. The branch runs between Asheville, North Carolina in the east and Murphy in the west. It roughly follows I-40 from Asheville to Canton and US Route 74, also known as the Great Smoky Mountains Expressway, from Canton to Murphy.

Grades on the Murphy Branch exceed 4.0% in two places.

Constructed with convict labor between 1881 and 1894 under the charter of the Western North Carolina Railroad. The Murphy Branch would be important to the development of southwestern North Carolina in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It opened up the isolated and rural mountains west of Asheville to the outside world, allowing easy travel and improved commerce. It can easily be said with confidence that these tracks made Western North Carolina what it is today.

In the 1980s, Norfolk Southern decided to close the Murphy Branch west of Sylva because of declining freight traffic. The NCDOT purchased the branch west of Dillsboro in 1988, the first purchase under NCDOT's program to preserve rail corridors, and granted trackage rights between Dillsboro and Andrews to the Great Smoky Mountains Railroad (GSMR), a tourist excursion railroad that also provides freight service. In 1996, the NCDOT sold the Dillsboro-Andrews portion of the Murphy Branch to the GSMR.

...
Wikipedia