The retirement of the Southern Railway Security Company marked the beginning of the withdrawal of the Pennsylvania from investment in the South. For the rest, it left the lines north of South Carolina in three main competing groups. There were the Coast Lines from Richmond south, the Richmond & Danville, and the East Tennessee, Virginia & Georgia properties. And stretching from west to east was the Memphis & Charleston, which was already in financial difficulties of a serious nature. All three of these groups were now thrown upon their own resources; and two of them, at least, took vigorous measures in self-protection. The policy of the East Tennessee was the most aggressive. Shut up in the narrow valley between the Clinch and the Great Smoky Mountains, and flanked by hostile roads, it conceived it to be necessary for it to acquire connections to the south, to the east, and to the west. Accordingly, it leased the Memphis & Charleston in 1877 and obtained an outlet upon the Mississippi River.[296] In 1878 it bought the Georgia Southern and the Selma, Rome & Dalton and provided itself with a line as far south as the Flint River in Alabama.[297] In 1881 it bought the Alabama Central, extending some 96 miles west from Selma. The same year it secured control of the Macon & Brunswick in Georgia, and began construction from Macon to Rome to complete a line to the South Atlantic coast.[298] In the north it made an alliance with the Norfolk & Western, which opened that company’s line from Bristol to Norfolk,[299] and arranged with the Louisville & Nashville and the Kentucky Central for construction to a connection at the Kentucky-Tennessee state line which should open to it the business of the Central West.[300]