The West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company founded Cass in 1901 as a purpose-built company town, every structure designed to serve the lumber operation on Back Allegheny Mountain. The sawmill at Cass became the largest double-band sawmill in the world, processing hundreds of millions of board feet of lumber over its lifetime. Immigrant workers laid standard-gauge track up grades so steep that only geared locomotives could climb them. The railroad pushed higher into the mountains, through a meadow that became Whittaker Station, past Gobblers Knob, and eventually to the summit of Bald Knob - the third-highest peak in West Virginia. At a remote stop called Spruce, the company built an entire town on top of the mountain: houses, a hotel, a company store, a doctor's office. All of it is gone now, reclaimed by the forest.

The five-hour round trip to the abandoned site of Spruce is perhaps the most haunting journey on the railroad. Spruce was once the coldest and highest town east of the Rocky Mountains, a place where loggers and their families endured brutal winters at elevation to cut red spruce for the pulp mills below. The company eventually extended tracks to a valley near the Shavers Fork of the Cheat River and built a second settlement - also called Spruce - complete with 30 company houses, a school, and a pulp mill. The original settlement became Old Spruce. Both are gone. The forest has grown back, and the only evidence of habitation is the cleared ground where the railroad stops. Visitors step off the train into silence, surrounded by the second-growth spruce that replaced the ancient forest the loggers took.

Cass owns eight Shay locomotives, one Heisler, and one Climax - three competing designs of geared steam locomotive, all invented to solve the same problem: how to move heavy loads up impossible grades. The Shay, designed by Ephraim Shay, uses vertical pistons and a geared driveshaft to power all wheels. The Heisler and Climax, both built in Pennsylvania, took different mechanical approaches to the same challenge. These are not replicas. They are the original machines, maintained by the Cass shop crew using skills passed down from the logging era. Visitors can tour the machine shops daily and watch mechanics work on engines that are well over a century old. The locomotives push converted log cars - flatcars with benches, essentially - up the same tracks that immigrant workers laid in 1901.

When the Mower Lumber Company shut down operations in 1960, the railroad and all its equipment were sold to a holding company that began scrapping everything. The tracks were being torn up and the locomotives cut apart when Russell Baum, a Pennsylvania train enthusiast, led a group of local businessmen in a campaign to convince the West Virginia state legislature to intervene. They succeeded. In 1963, the first tourist excursion train left the Cass depot for Whittaker Station. The railroad was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974. By 1977, the state had acquired the entire company town. Former workers' houses were restored and opened as vacation rentals. The company store became a gift shop. The Durbin and Greenbrier Valley Railroad assumed daily operations in 2015, but the state retains ownership of the equipment and the right-of-way.

Today, three excursions depart from the Cass depot. The two-hour round trip to Whittaker Station is the shortest, passing through forest to a recreated logging camp where visitors can see how the workers lived. The five-hour trip to the ghost town of Spruce follows the original logging route to its most remote outpost. And the five-hour trip to Bald Knob climbs to the third-highest point in West Virginia, offering panoramic views across the Appalachian ridges. All three trips share the same experience: the creak of vintage rolling stock, the hiss and chuff of steam, and the smell of coal smoke drifting through mountain air. At Bald Knob, a small cabin is available to rent - one of the most isolated overnight stays in the eastern United States.