Trains Skip Lexington, North Carolina 364 Days a Year. On October 24, Eight Will Stop for Barbecue.

For most of the year, the passenger trains that run between Charlotte and Raleigh pass through Lexington, North Carolina, without stopping. The city of pit-cooked pork has no regular rail service of its own. Then one Saturday each October, a temporary stop opens beside the tracks, and the trains start letting people off.

This year that Saturday is October 24. The North Carolina Department of Transportation announced last week that NC By Train, the state’s Amtrak service, will make eight stops in Lexington that day. Every one of them is for the 42nd annual Lexington Barbecue Festival, a free street party that fills the middle of a small Piedmont city with smoke and visitors.

A whole rail schedule bends for a chopped pork sandwich. To understand why the state goes to that trouble, it helps to start with the stop itself.

A station that exists for one day

Riders will step off at the Lexington Hospitality Center at 29 North Railroad Street, which the state describes as one block from the festival. Three trains arrive before noon and five more arrive after it. The last one pulls out at 6:10 p.m., a little after the festival’s 5:30 close.

Tickets are booked with the station code LEX, and Amtrak’s own listing for that code tells the story in its name. The stop is filed as “Lexington Barbeque Festival, NC,” a station named for an event instead of a town.

NC By Train says the special service boards in nine cities: Charlotte, Kannapolis, Salisbury, High Point, Greensboro, Burlington, Durham, Cary and Raleigh. That covers most of the state’s population corridor, which means a family in Raleigh can ride to lunch in Lexington and be home for supper without parking a car.

The festival shares the October schedule with two much larger draws. The same NCDOT announcement adds stops for the North Carolina State Fair, which runs 11 days, and an earlier train for a Carolina Panthers home game. A one-day barbecue festival sits on that list beside them, and the crowd it pulls explains how it got there.

How big one Saturday gets

The Lexington Barbecue Festival started in 1984. According to the festival’s own history, it was founded by Joe Sink Jr. and Kay Saintsing, and the first one drew 30,000 people. The idea was simple, and Cecil Conrad, whose family restaurant was among the first recruited, described it to Spectrum News, the regional cable news channel, in plain terms. The organizers wanted something to honor Lexington, he said, so they decided to honor the barbecue.

It grew far past that first crowd. Morgan Brinkle, executive director of the Lexington Tourism Authority, told Spectrum News last year that the festival has historically drawn as many as 200,000 people, most of them from out of town. Conrad put a dollar figure on it in the same report, saying the event is worth more than $10 million to Lexington in a single day.

The footprint matches the numbers. NC By Train describes the festival as stretching across 10 blocks of Uptown Lexington. The 2026 edition lists six entertainment stages and more than 250 art and craft vendors, and Destination BBQ, a regional barbecue guide, notes a 50-ton pig-themed sand sculpture among the attractions. Admission to the street festival is free.

The stages have a history of their own. In 2006, by the festival’s own account, the lineup included a teenage Taylor Swift, then at the start of her career. The music brings people in, but the reason any of it exists is served from tents on Main Street.

One style, cooked the same way for a century

The festival serves one kind of barbecue, and Lexington gave that kind its name. NCpedia, the state’s online encyclopedia, calls the city the inspirational center of the western style of North Carolina barbecue. That means pork shoulder, chopped or sliced, with a thin tomato-tinged sauce that locals call dip. It comes with hush puppies and a red slaw colored with ketchup or the dip itself.

The style is older than the festival by generations. Visit Lexington, the city’s tourism office, traces it to Sid Weaver, who set up a tent-covered pit on an uptown street corner more than a century ago. In the 1920s Jesse Swicegood and Will Johnson built pits near the original courthouse, and barbecue became a local industry.

The tourism office tells one story from those years that explains the town better than any statistic. The pits sat so close to the courthouse that hickory smoke rolled in through the windows, and that was how the judge knew it was time to recess for lunch.

The same office counts a dozen Lexington-style restaurants in and around the city today, each serving as many as 500 people a day or more. That concentration is why Lexington calls itself the Barbecue Capital of the World. On festival day, a handful of those restaurants carry the whole load.

The family that has cooked all of them

The Bar-B-Q Center on North Main Street has been open since 1955. Sonny Conrad bought it from his brother-in-law in 1967. After his death in 2013 his sons, Cecil and Michael Conrad, took over, and Spectrum News reported last October that the restaurant has provided food for all 41 festivals.

Festival Saturday is the restaurant’s busiest day of the year. On a normal day the Bar-B-Q Center sells hundreds of sandwiches. For the festival, Cecil Conrad told Spectrum News in 2023, it expects to sell thousands and brings in 35 extra employees to do it. The festival tents serve chopped sandwiches from 10 a.m. until 4 p.m. or until the meat is gone.

Conrad has been candid that the day is about more than the register. “You don’t make as much of a profit as someone would think,” he said in 2023. The payoff arrives months later, when visitors return in March or April and mention that they first came in October.

He is equally plain about the cooking. The restaurant still uses hickory and coals, he said, firing the meat the way Lexington cooks did more than 100 years ago. The dip gets poured over the sandwich so it soaks all the way to the bottom.

A harder year on Main Street

This festival arrives five months after a difficult night uptown. In the early hours of May 19, a fire near North Main and East Center streets destroyed two longtime businesses and damaged two others, according to ABC45, a television station serving the region. No injuries were reported.

The city’s tourism office answered with a campaign called Uplift Lexington, which asks people to help by visiting. Its message is that uptown is open and ready to welcome visitors while the rebuilding continues. The year’s largest crowd is about to take it up on that, and part of that crowd will come by rail.

The stop that may outlast the festival

The train is the part of this story still being written. Lexington has wanted regular passenger service for a long time. A 2022 city announcement said local officials had been seeking passenger rail for nearly two decades.

The money came first. In September 2020 the U.S. Department of Transportation awarded Lexington a $24.9 million grant toward a passenger rail and bus station in the city’s Depot District. Two years later the city announced that the funds had been released, with a goal of connecting by 2028.

The plan described in that announcement includes two new boarding platforms and a renovation of the historic freight depot as an interim station. Jason Orthner, the director of NCDOT’s Rail Division, said studies by the state and Amtrak found a Lexington station would add nearly 11,000 riders a year.

Until that station opens, the arrangement stays the way it has been. The trains pass through for 364 days. On the 365th, eight of them stop, the doors open a block from Main Street, and a city that built its name on pork shoulder feeds everyone who gets off.

Sources

N.C. Department of Transportation announcement via JoCo Report, “All October Special Stops By Train On Track” (Oct. 2, 2026); NC By Train, “Festivals, the Fair and Fall by Train”; WSOC-TV, “NC By Train modifies October schedules for major regional events” (Oct. 3, 2026); Amtrak, Lexington Barbeque Festival, NC (LEX); Spectrum News 1, “Festival returns to celebrate Lexington-style barbecue” (Oct. 24, 2025) and “Bar-B-Q Center prepares for barbecue lovers at annual festival” (Oct. 27, 2023); Visit Lexington, Barbecue history and Uplift Lexington; NCpedia, “Barbecue”; ABC45, “Residents in Disbelief After Blaze Tears Through Popular Lexington Businesses” (May 19, 2026); Davidson Local, “Lexington receives $25M in federal funding for train station” (Sept. 28, 2022); Transportation Today, “US Transportation Department funds to aid North Carolina multimodal project” (Sept. 15, 2020); The Barbecue Festival on Eventeny; Destination BBQ; Barbecue Bros.

Images: festival crowd courtesy a Tripadvisor traveler; NC By Train locomotive courtesy NCDOT via WWAY; Bar-B-Q Center sign courtesy a Tripadvisor traveler; dining room courtesy the Bar-B-Q Center; festival serving tent courtesy The Barbecue Festival.