Red River and Gulf RR Locomotive #106

The railroad exists because of a freight-rate dispute. Crowell and Spencer had run a private log tramway out of Long Leaf since 1895, west and southwest to its first timber, then east toward timber bought after 1900. When rates went up on George Gould's lines, the partners incorporated the Red River and Gulf in 1905 as a common carrier of their own, linking the mill to the Texas and Pacific at Lecompte. Over the Crowell and Meridian Lumber tramways it was hauling freight to Meridian, Louisiana, by the end of 1913.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Epps House: Solomon Northup's Gateway to Freedom — 15 mi
  The Creole cottage Solomon Northup helped build for the man who enslaved him, moved twice and now a small museum on the LSU Alexandria campus.
• Valentine Lake Recreation Area — 18 mi
  A 46-acre Kisatchie National Forest lake dug by Civilian Conservation Corps crews in the 1930s, with a campground and the head of the Wild Azalea Trail.
• Kent Plantation House — 21 mi
  Rapides Parish's oldest known standing building, a Creole house with a February tour and a 2023 memorial that put the enslaved first.
• Arna Bontemps African American Museum — 22 mi
  The restored Alexandria house where the Harlem Renaissance writer Arna Bontemps was born in 1902, on the Louisiana African American Heritage Trail.

More markers nearby

• The "Roundhouse", The Machine Shop and the "Car Knockers Shed" — steps away
• Long Leaf Sawmill (3) — steps away
• Crowell and Spencer Engine #400 — steps away
• Clyde Log Skidder — steps away