North Carolina Railway Museum

The line was chartered as the New Hope Valley Railroad in 1904 and merged into the Durham & South Carolina Railroad in 1905, which built it in 1905–06 to tap the timber resources of the New Hope Creek valley. In Durham it was the sole railroad with access to the American Tobacco Company plant, and after an extension south to Duncan between 1911 and 1913 it was leased in 1920 by the 'old' Norfolk Southern Railroad to give that company its own route into the city. The museum's parent organization began in 1963 at East Carolina University in Greenville and was chartered as the East Carolina Chapter of the National Railway Historical Society. When construction of the B. Everett Jordan Dam flooded the valley to form Jordan Lake in the 1970s, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers rebuilt the line on a new alignment; a six-mile section that had briefly belonged to the Southern Railway was sold to the chapter in 1982, and its members formed the New Hope Valley Railway. The organization adopted its current name, North Carolina Railway Museum, Inc., early in 2008, while the route's abandoned northern portion toward Durham lives on as the American Tobacco Trail.