The Blue Ridge Scenic Railway

The line leaves the depot, clears the edge of town within a few minutes and then spends almost the whole of the outbound run beside the Toccoa. That is the ride. There is no summit, no tunnel and no dramatic trestle: it is thirteen miles of a mountain river at close range, with the water sometimes directly below the car and sometimes a field away behind trees.

What changes is the season, and it changes the trip more than most people expect. In April the river is high and loud and the hardwoods are still bare enough to see through, so you get the shape of the valley. By July the leaf canopy has closed and the view narrows to green walls and glimpses of water, with tubers and fly fishermen in it. From the last week of September the same thirteen miles turn over into orange and red at a rate that varies year to year, and the train becomes very hard to get a seat on.

You will also pass the backs of things: river cabins on stilts, a swinging footbridge or two, jon boats pulled up on gravel bars, and long stretches of nothing but water and rhododendron. It is a slow, low-drama, genuinely pretty ride, and the people who come away disappointed are almost always the ones who expected a theme-park attraction rather than an hour beside a river.

The train sets you down at the twin towns and leaves you there for around two hours. McCaysville is the Georgia side, Copperhill is the Tennessee side, and they are one small place with a river and a border through the middle.

The border is the attraction. A line painted on the pavement in McCaysville marks where Georgia stops, there is usually a queue of people taking turns to straddle it, and everybody does it. Two things about that line are worth knowing. It is a tourist marker rather than a surveyor's monument, so do not expect legal precision. And crossing it does not change your watch: East Tennessee runs on Eastern time, the same as Georgia. What does change is the phone system. Georgia numbers here are 706 and Tennessee numbers are 423, which is the only part of the border most locals think about.

Two hours is enough for lunch and a wander and not much more. The towns are small, some of the trade is seasonal, and in the quieter months a proportion of the shopfronts will be shut on the day you arrive. Come with the layover framed as a pleasant small-town stop with a novelty line in it, and it delivers. Come expecting a destination in its own right and it will not.

If anyone in your group struggles with heat, note that shade on the platform and along the main street is limited, and a July layover in the middle of the day is a long time to stand in the sun.

Stand in Copperhill and look at the slopes around you, and there is something slightly off about them compared with the Georgia side you have just ridden through. Younger trees. More uniform. Less of that layered Appalachian mess of ages and species.

That is not an accident of geology. Copper ore was found in this basin in 1843 and commercial mining began in 1847, and for well over a century this was one of the great copper districts in the eastern United States. During the Civil War the basin supplied the overwhelming majority of the Confederacy's copper. The mining itself was not the problem: the smelting was. Roasting the ore in open heaps released sulphur dioxide, the acid killed the vegetation, and the forests that survived that were cut down to fuel the furnaces. Something like 32,000 acres of a roughly 60,000-acre basin ended up bare red ground, gullied and treeless, and it was routinely described as looking like a desert dropped into the Appalachians.

Replanting began in 1939 with the TVA and the mining companies working together, a Civilian Conservation Corps camp arrived in 1941 to lime the acid soil, and the effort ran for decades. The last mine closed in 1987. What you are looking at from the train platform is a landscape that was destroyed and then deliberately rebuilt, which is a considerably more interesting thing to explain to a child than a painted line.

In October the train sells out. That is not a reason to cancel the day, because the destination is a twenty-minute drive from the depot.

Driving north out of Blue Ridge puts you in McCaysville without a ticket, and the painted line, the river and the two-state photograph are all exactly where the train would have left you. You lose the ride, which is the best part, and you gain the ability to arrive at nine in the morning and leave when you like. For a family with a toddler who will not sit still for two hours, that trade is often the better one anyway.

The other substitution worth knowing about is the river itself. The train shows you thirteen miles of the Toccoa from a seat. You can get considerably closer to the same water for nothing at the public access points along it, or spend an afternoon floating a stretch of it in summer, and a lot of people who ride the train once end up preferring the river at ground level.

One thing that does not substitute: there is no way to ride one leg and drive the other. Tickets are sold as a round trip from Blue Ridge, and the layover is not a drop-off.