The next-to-leading order analysis for the cross section for hadroproduction of top quark pairs close to threshold is presented. Within the framework of non-relativistic QCD a significant enhancement compared to fixed order perturbation theory is observed which originates from the characteristic remnant of the 1S peak below production threshold of top quark pairs. The analysis includes all color singlet and color octet configurations of top quark pairs in S-wave states and, for the dominant configurations, it employs all-order soft gluon resummation for the hard parton cross section. Numerical results for the Large Hadron Collider at $\sqrt{s} = 14 $TeV and $\sqrt{s} = 10 $TeV and also for the Tevatron are presented. The possibility of a top quark mass measurement from the invariant mass distribution of top quark pairs is discussed.
