With three-fourths of the State debt represented in railroad bonds, large sums were voted to encourage railroad development, but only a small amount of the money was actually used for this purpose. When large foreign loans were floated to meet the interest on the public debt, a number of railroads combined to refuse interest payments to their stockholders in order to force due coupons into the market at lower rates. These were bought and later used to discharge their obligations. Main lines of the Nashville, Chattanooga and St. Louis Railway connect Chattanooga, Nashville, Memphis, and Paducah, Kentucky, each on a different large river, separated by hundreds of miles. Connections between these cities have been established only by surmounting many and varied natural obstacles - badly drained swampland in West Tennessee and high plateaus and rivers in other sections.
Transcontinental service is operated from Memphis westward.
Despite the excellent railroad system many communities are more than twenty-five miles from a railroad, and eight counties are entirely without rail service. For this reason the development of motor transport service was encouraged, and today this form of transportation reaches virtually every point in the State. Motor coaches are operated by 50 companies, and trucks by more than 300. The next year Fort Worth was connected with Cleveland by way of Nashville and Memphis, and in 1934 the Nashville-Washington section opened to complete the Southern Transcontinental line. Tennessee had twenty-three airports and landing fields in 1932.