Split Rail Magazine

Split Rail was the scrappiest of the regional men's magazines we've recovered. Published quarterly out of Beckley, West Virginia by Earl Tackett—a former coal miner turned bar owner turned unlikely magazine publisher—it ran for thirteen issues before Earl's bad back and worse bookkeeping caught up with him.

The girls were local: waitresses, librarians, nurses, and factory workers from the coal towns and river hollows of southern Appalachia. The photography was done by Earl himself on a used Mamiya, and the printing was the cheapest offset he could find—B&W interiors on newsprint-grade stock, with color only on the cover. What it lacked in polish it made up for in authenticity. These were real mountain women, and Earl's gruff publisher's voice gave the magazine a personality that bigger titles couldn't match.

The articles covered moonshine culture, truck road tests, hunting, and the kind of blue-collar humor that only lands if you've worked a shift underground. The ads were for coal companies, gun shops, general stores, and bourbon. Split Rail's archive was found in Earl's nephew's barn in Raleigh County in 2025, wrapped in garbage bags and remarkably well-preserved.