On this date in 1970, trains 41 and 42, the N&W/SOU Pelican between New York, NY and New Orleans, LA ran for the last time.

According to William Warden and Kenneth Miller's Norfolk and Western Passenger Service 1946-1971, the Pelican would be combined with the Birmingham Special (previously trains 17 and 1 into a Bristol TN/VA-Washington, D.C. train which lasted until the coming of Amtrak in May of 1971.

Based upon the images in the book, these trains carried anything from J-class steam locomotives or passenger-equipped GP9s to Southern E-units or FP7s.

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Robert Hall 'Racehorse' Smith, President of the Norfolk and Western Railway Company between 1946 and 1958, died on this date in 1960 at the age of 72.

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Like any good railfan, I've got a couple of railroad calendars scattered throughout the house. The April photograph from the Norfolk and Western Historical Society's 2007 calendar is captioned thusly:

RB-3, the daily through freight from Roanoke to Bristol passes Dublin, Virginia in charge of GP9 No. 903 on a March day in 1978. Of historical significance, it was here that Union General Crook with 6,500 troops arrived on the property of N&W's predecessor, the Virginia & Tennessee, May 9, 1864. They destroyed the Dublin depot and water tank. Crook then set an eastwardly course to Central Depot (East Radford) sabotaging the New River bridge, water tanks, crossties, and engine wood. Learning that Confederate troops from the east were en route by V&T trains, the force, by then at Christiansburg, retreated to West Virginia on May 14, 1864.

RB-3 is powered by three early EMD GP units (903, 756, 909) with two more modern EMD units trailing in the 15xx and 2xx(x) series. According to a roster I have laying around,the first locomotive is an SD35, while I can't identify the second one. A leading two on a four-digit road number usually indicates an ex-Nickel Plate unit, but I can't tell. Another possibility is one of the N&W's GP35s, which would also make sense for a through train of this sort.

All but one of the locomotives---our mystery unit---are painted in the 'F6' livery, distinguished by the sans serif 'NW' plastered on the flanks, nose, and rear of the unit. The mystery unit looks like it is painted in scheme 'F4' or 'F5', both of which used the so-called "Pevler blue" as the base color, with lettering in Dulux Gold.

Given the train symbol system currently used by the Norfolk Southern Railway, it is likely that train RB-3 passed into history some time after the 1982 merger. A quick glance at Joe Shaw's data on trains in that area doesn't reveal an immediate successor to RB-3, alas.

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I'd planned to start this feature several years ago, but I lost the note to do it and only recently found it buried in a giant WordPerfect document that had miscellaneous blog notes.

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1 I had easy time reading your blog. But it seems now it's over . Man, this post sucks. I hope at least the next one won't be.

Posted by: Don Tolep at April 06, 2008 02:53 PM (rAsIa)

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15 December 1890: The Shenandoah Valley Railway is sold to the Norfolk and Western Railway.

Construction on the SVRR began in 1879, with the completion of the Waynesboro-Hagerstown, Maryland component in 1881. A westward connection to Roanoke and the N&W would be completed in 1882.

By 1885, the SVRR was in receivership. It would remain so until its reorganization in September 1890 as the SVRY, after a foreclosure sale. Three months later, the Norfolk and Western Railway would acquire the line, providing single-line service to Hagerstown. Once in Hagerstown, connections could be made with the Pennsylvania Railroad for access to Northeastern markets.

So far as I understand it, the old SVRY is still valuable in its third century of existence, serving today's Norfolk Southern Railway.

UPDATE: I did some more digging, and came up with a bit more information that I thought useful.

As the rails lie, there are 239 miles in the N&W Shenandoah Division between Roanoke and Hagerstown. Scheduled passenger service for the spring of 1899 consisted of two trains, 3/4 running between Hagerstown and Roanoke, and 27/28 running between Hagerstown and Shenandoah.¹ A quick bit of very rough math---not taking into account any time for stops---suggests that 3/4, on an 8.5 hour schedule, averaged 28MPH. Trains 27/28 needed four hours to cover 107 miles, for an average speed of 27MPH.

For what it's worth, Roanoke-New York City and Bristol-New York City through service was provided for some time via the Shenandoah Division and the PRR northward. When the PRR discontinued its part of this service in 1962, the N&W cooperated with the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway to continue the New York connection. Sleeping cars from the then-Train 1/2 would be attached to the C&O's Fast Flying Virginian, ostensibly to head north to Washington Union Station for delivery to the Pennsylvania.

Information for the update came from George Elwood and Norfolk and Western Passenger Service 1946-1971 by W.E. Warden and K.L. Miller.

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¹ These train numbers are not to be confused with later uses. Numbers 3/4 would later be reassigned to The Pocahontas, which began running Norfolk-Cincinnati/Columbus in 1926.

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15 November 1967: The Norfolk and Western Railway operates the then-longest train in the world, 500 loaded hoppers of coal from Iaeger, West Virginia, to Portsmouth, Ohio.

Sure it's another success for Precision Transportation, but so what? Here's what: Five hundred hoppers loaded with coal plus six locomotives (EMD SD45 with the high hood, each rated at 3600 horsepower) and a single cabin car equals 21,424.75 feet. In other words, that's over four miles of train, hauling 48,000+ tons of coal. For comparison, modern unit trains of coal "tend" to max out at around 130 or so hoppers of similar size.¹ Forty-eight thousand tons is more than the standard displacement of an Iowa-class battleship, so make of that what you will.

I doubt this effort was repeated, but it wouldn't surprise me if someone else tried it. My source for this post indicates that the train topped out at 20MPH, for whatever reason. I am neither an employee of a railway nor am I particularly good at operations, but I would bet that such a train would probably be more trouble than it's worth, for the following reasons: more...

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14 November 1955: The Norfolk and Western Railway initiates piggyback service from Bristol, Virginia, to points in the Northeast. This service came five days after the Pennsylvania Railroad, the N&W, and the Rail-Trailer Company of Chicago, Illinois incorporate the Trailer Train Company.¹

My source (albeit a PRR one) indicates that "[m]any small towns had their own ramp for 'circus style' loading". Compared to somewhere like Philadelphia or Harrisburg, Bristol qualifies as a small town. My source in the Bristol area says that he's never seen anything like a TOFC ramp, but admits that he wouldn't recognize one anyways.

I've never actually seen a vintage TOFC car, but I do believe that the Virginia Museum of Transportation may actually have a first- or second-generation example. It's not linked at their website, and I don't have any digital images of it.

The Trailer Train Company would later include a lot of railroads amongst its stockholders. This was a move to avoid demurrage charges, which arose when one road's railcars were left on another road's property. It may have been calculated on a per day or per week basis; sources seem to conflict on this. Basically put, demurrage is like a late fee for a boxcar.²

Anyways, the creation of TOFC/Container on Flat Car service would lead to the intermodal trains of today, which whistle along the paths once trod by trains like the Powhatan Arrow and the Broadway Limited. TOFC service was a desperate (and apparently successful) strike at over-the-road truckers who had been wrenching market share from the railroads for at least a quarter century at that point (1955).

While the Pennsylvania Railroad vanished into history on 01 February 1968, the Trailer Train Company survives today, as the TTX Company. If you're even just a casual observer of railroad operations, you've probably seen a TTX-owned well car, a RailBox ("Next Load/Any Road") boxcar, or one of their RailGons. Hats off to Trailer Train for their half-century of success! (Notice their 50th anniversary logo; the PRR's stylistic influence lives on with a sleek keystone.)

UPDATE: I looked back at my post on this subject in 2004, and found something interesting. My correspondent in the Bristol area can't figure out where the TOFC ramp would have been, but this fellow appears to have located the thing in his layout designs. I sent the map of the N&W Bristol yard to my man in the Bristol area, and he's come up short as to where it might have been. It's been half a century since this existed, and there's been plenty of time for things to have been removed.

For what it's worth, I would have enjoyed seeing an N&W "A" 2-6-6-4 pull a TOFC train.

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¹ The N&W was a logical partner for this venture, inasmuch as the PRR held something like a third of N&W stock at this point. The PRR derived a lot of income from the N&W dividends, and would sorely miss that revenue after 1968. The Interstate Commerce Commission would order the divestiture of the PRR's N&W holdings from 1965 forward as a result of the N&W/Wabash/Nickel Plate/AC&Y mergers, and final divestiture was necessary for the PRR/NYCS/NYNH&H merger creating the ill-fated Penn Central Transportation Company.

² I'm sure that the Superintendent of the Cold Spring Shops or Rip will correct me on this if I'm wrong.

Considerable information for this post was gleaned from the Keystone Crossings website.

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12 November 1870: The Atlantic, Mississippi & Ohio Railroad is founded by Major General William T. Mahone, CSA (ret.) from three predecessor roads in Virginia. The AM&O stretched from Norfolk to Bristol, and is still largely in use by the Norfolk Southern Railway.

The AM&O is the direct corporate ancestor of the Norfolk and Western Railroad--- which in turn would become the Norfolk and Western Railway---which came into existence after the AM&O's sale at foreclosure in 1881.

As always, initial information for this came from the Norfolk and Western Historical Society calendar.

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I don't have my book on N&W passenger service handy, but off the cuff, I recall that the Arrow (Winston Link's favorite N&W passenger train, apparently) was combined with the Pocahontas, which was arguably the N&W's next best train. If memory serves, the "new" Pocahontas sported a Pullman-Standard Vista-Dome car, taken from the former Wabash Railroad's Blue Bird trainsets.

Even though the new Pocahontas would survive into 1971, its route would not be picked up by the National Railroad Passenger Corporation, and thus went into permanent retirement.

The Cavalier was notable for having its own logo, a fellow in a large hat with a Van Dyke beard. According to Kenneth L. Miller, people today would recognize it as the basic image used by the University of Virginia's Cavaliers sports teams. (One wonders if the people in C-ville paid the N&W, or if they just assumed that they, as Mr. Jefferson's University, were entitled to it.) From a reading of Norfolk and Western Passenger Service 1946-1971, the Cavalier was never particularly a crack train with the best equipment. Amusing.

I could be wrong on anything other than the date and trains affected; blame a combination of Kenneth L. Miller and my shoddy memory if something turns up wrong.

Primary information for this post was gathered from the 2005 color calendar published by the Norfolk and Western Historical Society.

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On this day in April 1952, #2200, the last of the aforementioned Y6b class locomotives left the Roanoke Shops.

It is rumored that at least two Y6b locomotives survived into the late 1970s in a Roanoke scrapyard, but ultimately fell to the unyielding torches of the murderous maw which demands the sacrifice of history. Yes, I'm waxing either maudlin or grotesque, but blast it, Biggs, where were the Claytor brothers when you needed them?

The only surviving Y-class locomotive resides far from home, in the National Transportation Museum in St. Louis, Missouri. When I'm King of the World---with apologies to James Cameron---Y6a #2156 will be returned to her proper place with #611 and #1218 under the Claytor Pavilion at the Virginia Museum of Transportation.

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On this day in 1948, #2171, the first of thirty locomotives in the Y6b class of 2-8-8-2 steam locomotives rolled clear of the N&W's Roanoke Shops. These monsters weighed 961,500 pounds, complete with a loaded tender.

The entire Y class of locomotives was not designed for anything like the "Wabash Cannonball" or other high-speed freight applications, much less passenger service. The N&W had the A and J classes of locomotives for that, respectively. The Y class was intended to pull (or push) huge coal drags out of the dark hollows of West Virginia, the kinds of places that Chuck Yeager used to suggest would need sunlight piped in. Back then, and even today, coal drags are not the fastest things in the world. Sources tell me that the CSX rulebook imposes a 40MPH speed limit on coal trains, mostly so that coal won't be sucked out of the hoppers and lost to the buyer. (After all, we don't want that; the shipper and recipient might want to pay less for the service.)

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