Such new opportunities established Elizabeth City as a thriving deep-water port whose varied industries as lumbering, shipbuilding, grain, fish and oyster processing, together once made the city a formidable regional economic center rivaling that of Norfolk, Virginia, and Baltimore, Maryland. With the 1881 establishment of the Elizabeth City and Norfolk Railroad, later renamed the Norfolk Southern Railway, water-based shipping was rendered less relevant, with many of the waterside industries relocating to the growing cities of North Carolina's Upper Coastal Plain and Piedmont.