Acting through the two railroads, the Seaboard Air Line Agency acquired the Raleigh & Augusta Air Line Railroad (R&AAL) in November 1875 and struck an agreement with the Carolina Central Railway (CC) for trackage rights between Hamlet and Charlotte in 1877. Through freight and passenger service was established between Charlotte and Portsmouth, Va., which had steamer connections to Baltimore and the North. Early in 1879 the agency was replaced by the Seaboard Air Line Association (SAL), which controlled the S&R, R&G, R&AAL, and CC.
On 1 Aug. 1893 the SAL was reorganized as the SAL Railway System, although each company retained its corporate identity. In the 1920s, under the presidency of S. David Warfield, the SAL entered on a large-scale expansion into Florida, which was enjoying an enormous land boom. Construction began on the Florida, Western, and Northern Railroad to West Palm Beach and reached Miami early in 1927. The boom burst with the stock market collapse of October 1929, and on 23 Dec. 1930 the SAL entered a long receivership that did not end until reorganization of the company as the Seaboard Air Line Railway on 1 Aug. 1945. At that time it operated 3,857 miles of track.
The late 1940s and 1950s were good to the SAL, and for the first time in its history revenues exceeded those of the rival Atlantic Coast Line Railroad (ACL). Tracks, signaling, and equipment were improved, and the great freight yard at Hamlet-the operating heart of the system, where its lines to Florida met with those to Atlanta and Birmingham and to Richmond-was thoroughly modernized in 1954.
the merger was long delayed by litigation in the courts, where communities, including the city of Tampa, Fla., and shippers sought to preserve competition. The U.S. Supreme Court finally ruled in favor of the companies by a unanimous vote, and on 1 July 1967 the ACL merged with the Seaboard Air Line Railway to form the Seaboard Coast Line Railroad. (The redundant name was chosen to preserve the two lines' shortened names "Seaboard" and "Coast Line," as they were generally known.)
After the merger of the SAL and ACL and subsequent mergers leading to the formation of the CSX Transportation Corporation in July 1987, traffic was rerouted in the most efficient manner and a number of SAL lines were abandoned. Through freight traffic on the former SAL main line across North Carolina was diverted to and from Hamlet by way of Pembroke, over the former Carolina Central route to the former ACL main line. The tracks have been pulled up from a point north of Henderson to Petersburg. The Silver Star passenger train from New York to Florida continues to be operated by AMTRAK but uses a Norfolk Southern Corporation connection from Selma on the ACL line to Raleigh. It then operates over the SAL line through Southern Pines, Hamlet, and Columbia, S.C., to and from Florida.