The Observation Lounge

May 2009 Updates

There are tantalizing bits of information that have recently been located, and these are slowly filling in the gaps to the Bay Shore's origins. When you read our current and previous descriptions of the road, you get the feeling that the entire route just popped into being over the course of a year - 1898 to 1899. Not so. There was a beginning to this enterprise, which goes back several decades earlier; perhaps as far back as the Civil War. What we have found is another railroad that became the foundation which the Bay Shore was both built upon and added to.

By the opening of the year 1898, the Mobile & Dauphin Island railroad was already history, although it had the potential to be everything the Mobile & Bay Shore was or could have been. The M&DI was intended to connect Dauphin Island to the City of Mobile, and even went so far as to seek funding from Congress to construct a trestle from Cedar Point. Although the trestle funding had been approved as of September 26, 1890, that trestle was never built, and the railroad defaulted. But we know the trackage from Cedar Point north to Mertz was constructed and was in operation, because the Bay Shore operated on it until their own closure in 1940, and the GM&O operated it down to Farnell until their merger into the ICG in 1983. This right-of-way (ROW) followed the same meandering path northward that we have become so familiar with until it reached the Mertz community, where the line terminated at or just beyond the Farmer's Market. Fruit growers and produce farmers shipped their output to this market for direct sales or further shipping to other cities.

What this meant for the future Mobile & Bay Shore was a great reduction in how much ROW they needed to complete a connection with the Mobile & Ohio parent road in Prichard. The following segments of ROW were all that were required:

• Prichard Junction to Tacon;
• Government Street to Mertz;
• The Narrows to Alabama Port;

The following length of road was added to the list, but was not a required segment based on the M&O's ambitions:

• Delchamps to Coden and Bayou la Batre.

Note the ommission of the line between Tacon and Government Street. This was already a graded ROW, owned and operated by the Mobile, Jackson & Kansas City (later Gulf, Mobile & Northern). All that was needed here was to add to the existing ROW, and construct the trackage. An interchange was constructed between these two roads in this area.