Fordyce & Princeton Railroad

At its peak in the logging and lumber days, the Fordyce & Princeton was a well-maintained logging railroad which operated Shay locomotives which pulled the log trains at the maximum speeds of the geared Shays. The F&P also had a couple of rod engines. After World War II, when the virgin timber was cut out, most of the F&P was abandoned leaving only about two miles which was operated as a switching carrier that served the world’s first southern pine plywood plant at Fordyce. The plywood plant generated an average of about six to eight carloads of plywood and a like number of woodchip carloads per day. Other industries included a dirt floor sawmill that was consistently profitable and generated a few carloads of lumber each week, a pulpwood loading yard which also loaded and shipped about eight carloads of short stick pulpwood per day, and a creosote plant that sporadically shipped inbound green poles and lumber for treatment and also shipped the treated products outbound.

Russell Tedder