No railroad had ever been built across the sparsely populated panhandle of Florida, which left Pensacola isolated from the rest of the state.

[5] It was Chipley, a tireless promoter of his adopted city, who was responsible for initiating discussions with the L&N concerning its extension into the Florida Panhandle.

[11] Both white and black laborers from the Panhandle as well as adjoining parts of Alabama and Georgia were recruited to build the track and bridges.

This two-story wooden structure was replaced in 1912 by a larger L&N passenger station of brick and stucco, at the corner of Wright and Alcaniz.

[11] The recollections of J. D. Smith of Thomasville, Georgia, who at age 19 hired out as a foreman on the crew building westward from Marianna, were published in a 1926 issue of the L&N Employees' Magazine:[11] I was surprised to find in Jackson County, fertile lands, and the country around Marianna inhabited with old-line Southern farmers, a people of the highest type of civilization, operating many large plantations, at that time snow-white for miles and miles along the public roads, with hundreds of negroes picking and ginning it for market.

Much money was lost by the planters on account of long delays in shipping their cotton up the Chattahoochee River to Columbus, Ga., waiting on rains to raise the river.The people [at Greenwood] and at Marianna came out to question us about the railroad.

.The line was built to 5 ft (1,524 mm) gauge, as was common for Southern railroads of the time, including the L&N, and used 50-pound steel rail.

[13] On May 30, 1886, the Louisville and Nashville changed the gauge of all its lines (over 2,000 miles (3,200 km) of track) to 4 ft 9 in (1,448 mm) in a one-day system-wide effort requiring the labor of about 8,000 men from dawn to dusk.

L&N records also show that six 4-4-0's (four by Rogers, two by Rhode Island) bought by the P&A in 1881-82 had originally belonged to the Mobile and Montgomery Railway, which was acquired by the L&N in 1881.

Another trade and transportation link for Northwest Florida was provided by a branch of the Savannah, Florida and Western Railroad (a predecessor of the Atlantic Coast Line) from Chattahoochee to Climax, Georgia and thence to Savannah [420 miles (680 km)] from Pensacola, which, like Jacksonville, was an important ocean port and railroad junction for rail traffic on the eastern seaboard.

Before the railroad was built, the only way for Pensacola rail traffic to reach Savannah or Jacksonville was by a long, circuitous route via Montgomery and Macon.

[16] In 1894, sawmill operator W. B. Wright opened the 26-mile (42 km) Yellow River Railroad between Crestview and Florala, Alabama via Auburn, Campton, and Laurel Hill.

An abandoned military railroad in Louisiana was moved to the Eglin Air Force Base reservation after World War II, connecting with the L&N at Mossy Head.

[21] CSX sold the P&A route to the Class III shortline Florida Gulf & Atlantic Railroad, which commenced operations on June 1, 2019.

U.S. Highway 90 and Interstate 10 run generally parallel to the P&A route across Northwest Florida, usually to the south of the railroad and sometimes adjacent to it.

The principal industry was running logs down the rivers to go to Pensacola.The building of a railroad through the cypress swamps and dense pine forests of the Panhandle was a boon to the economy of Pensacola, which had a fine deepwater harbor (the largest in Florida)[6] for the development of port facilities and overseas shipping, but no direct railroad link to Atlantic ports and East Coast cities before 1883.

According to Kincaid Herr, official historian of the Louisville and Nashville, "Much of the credit for the subsequent development of this section of Florida is due to the L&N.

The land had originally been given to Florida by the federal government through internal improvement acts in the 1850s for the purpose of promoting the building of railroads.

[23] During its first fiscal year, ending in 1884, the Pensacola and Atlantic had revenues of $189,098 and received another $58,000 from land sales, which after deducting expenses left a net profit of $75,391; however, this was less than half the amount needed to cover the $180,000 it owed in bond interest to the Louisville and Nashville.

The line did, however, facilitate trade and travel into and out of the region, and directly spurred the establishment and growth of numerous towns along the route, including Crestview, DeFuniak Springs, Bonifay, Chipley, and Cottondale.

[6] The L&N also invested heavily in the development of the port of Pensacola for many decades, and the property taxes it paid in each county along the P&A line added to the local economy too.