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Hurricane Helene left Western North Carolina’s railways in disarray, causing $345 million in damage and halting all rail traffic west of Hickory. But by late March, repairs were either underway or complete on most of the region’s damaged tracks and bridges. 

One historic stretch, however, was still largely untouched: A 16-mile line between Old Fort in McDowell County and Swannanoa in Buncombe County, famed for the spiraling “Old Fort Loops” that connect Western North Carolina to the rest of the state. It was infamous for the way those loops were built: Between 1875 and 1879, hundreds of convicts, most of them Black men, died blasting the tunnels and laying the tracks that crossed the Continental Divide and spurred Asheville’s development.

Helene decimated Old Fort and the tracks rising from the town toward the Blue Ridge Mountains. At least six landslides were reported along the railway, dangling long stretches of track in midair. Elsewhere, the tracks themselves seem to have jumped and landed a few feet to the left or right of indentations where they once stood. 

“When I saw the damage, I just wanted to throw up,” said Steve Little, the mayor of nearby Marion and a rail enthusiast. “It was horrible.”

For nearly eight months, locals and train lovers wondered whether rail traffic would ever return to the area. Part of Norfolk Southern’s AS line, which serves Western N.C. businesses and short-line railroads with freight, the Old Fort-Swannanoa stretch wasn’t included in the company’s updates on Helene recovery. Company officials declined to comment on a March report that they were rebuilding.

Old Fort Mayor Pam Snypes, who took office one month and one day before Helene hit, said the sound of bells at a railroad crossing broke up a town meeting in April. Staff gathered around windows at town hall to watch.

“The railroad coming through Old Fort is something very special, and we desperately want the railway to repair the tracks so the trains can start flowing again,” Snypes said in an early April interview.

OFinally, on May 21, Norfolk Southern finally announced it would rebuild the Old Fort-Swannanoa line. Company officials said they hope to finish this winter.

This spring, photographer Jesse Barber toured sections of Norfolk Southern railroad in Western North Carolina and east Tennessee, capturing the damage and recovery efforts.

Little, who chairs the Western North Carolina Rail Committee and wrote a book about the Old Fort-Swannanoa line’s history, points out a stretch of track left hanging by a washout.

”The landslides did every bit as much damage as the flooding,” he said. “The road’s slid off the mountain. There’s nothing there anymore.”
Old Fort was one of the towns Helene hit hardest. After the storm, Snypes said, the town’s sewer system was under 14 feet of water. Here a concrete culvert lies exposed by a washout that also damaged railroad tracks.
Use of the Old Fort-Swannanoa track had dwindled before Helene. Since the 2020 closure of a railyard in nearby Linwood, a daily freight train serving businesses between Asheville and Hickory has been the only routine traffic. But the line is a centerpiece of efforts to bring passenger rail back to Western North Carolina for the first time since 1975. In December 2023, the federal government awarded state rail officials a $500,000 grant to plan for passenger service between Salisbury and Asheville.
A cleanup crew stacks debris from downed trees. After Hurricane Helene, limbs, branches, and trunks blocked railroads and roads throughout Western North Carolina. The storm did $214 million in damage to private and public forest lands, according to the North Carolina Forest Service. 
A bridge outage in Newport, Tenn., was one of Norfolk Southern’s biggest barriers in restoring traffic on its 139 miles of Western North Carolina track. Cranes fit the final sections in mid-March, making way for the first post-Helene trains to reach Asheville in early April.
A long line of rail cars stopped on still-damaged tracks just north of Asheville along the French Broad River. 

Jimmy Ryals is a writer based in Raleigh. A Kinston native, his work has appeared in Slate, several eastern North Carolina newspapers, and little notes in his kids’ lunchboxes. You can see more of his writing here.

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Jesse Barber is a documentary photographer based in the Appalachian region of North Carolina. His work has been featured in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and The Washington Post.