Visiting the auto display at the North Carolina Transportation Museum

By Jim Meachen
Abandoned Cars and Trucks

(December 29, 2013) SPENCER, N.C. — Southern Railway's Spencer Shops was a major steam locomotive repair facility between Atlanta and Washington, D.C.; once its largest center. The period of greatest prosperity and productivity for the facility was in the first half of the 20th Century.

These type of repair service facilities for the railroads were called "back shops." They were located in every division of a railroad system and centralized for the most extensive kinds of repairs. The Spencer "back shops" was named in honor of the first president of the Southern Railway, Samuel Spencer (1847 – 1906), as was the name of the new town developed for these facilities.

The original buildings included a machine shop, storehouse building, office building, wood working shop, and a combination smith and boiler shop. It even had a power plant, an automobile repair facility, and a 37-bay roundhouse where locomotives could be worked on. It employed between 2,500 and 3,000 people at any one time.

The Spencer Shops, and the town of Spencer, is located just north of Salisbury.

The demise of the active operations of the Spencer Shops was due to the conversion from steam locomotives to diesel locomotives which took place between the 1950s and the 1970s.

Today the Spencer Shops complex is now part of the North Carolina Transportation Museum, which opened in the early '80s. 1990 saw the opening of a new exhibit area, “Bumper to Bumper” representing automobiles through the decades.

Although the auto museum is rather small, it includes some very interesting vehicles. Located three miles southwest of Interstate 85 Exit 81, the entire Spencer facility museum is open to the public and admission is free.

The following are highlights of the "Bumper to Bumper" museum:

1914 Ford Model T Touring