In a Mountain State town, ghosts of the Virginian

Summer brings road trips and, inevitably, a visit to a railroad town, defunct or otherwise. There’s something irresistible to me about seeing a small place that once depended on a railroad, or still does.  

Princeton, W.Va., belongs in the former category, now that its claim to fame, the old Virginian Railway, is mostly gone. Decades of retrenchments brought about by the VGN’s successors, first Norfolk & Western and then Norfolk Southern, have left the town pretty quiet. 

In its day, the Virginian was a formidable, heavy-duty railroad, and a wealthy one. Completed in 1907 after the combination of the Deepwater Railway and the Tidewater Railway, the VGN was the capstone on the careers of civil engineer William Nelson Page and oil and mining plutocrat Henry Huttleston Rogers. It was late in the railroad game, so their idea to build a new system to carry West Virginia bituminous coal straight to tidewater at Norfolk was audacious, and a stunning rebuke to N&W.

Rogers’ railroad was successful for decades, setting high standards for both profitability and engineering. The Virginian proved you could have both. When N&W finally absorbed its pesky competitor in 1959, it acknowledged its acquisition’s strength by shifting eastbound coal traffic to the VGN east of the mountains. It also quickly wiped away most signs of its formal rival. 

As a result, a visit to Princeton is now mostly a search for ghosts. But that’s OK, I thought, as we pulled off Interstate 77 a few days ago and made our way into downtown, a once substantial commercial streetscape now home to a lot of empty storefronts but distinguished by the magnificent art deco Mercer County courthouse. Surely the legacy of the railroad would be easy to find.

I wasn’t disappointed. The end of Mercer Street brought the Princeton Railroad Museum into view. It’s a rather grand two-story structure, and nearly brand new, having been built recently as a replica of the original VGN station, demolished in 1979. Parked alongside is Virginian caboose 308, a handsome steel center-cupola hack turned out by St. Louis Car in 1948.

Inside the station, the museum has plenty to see. In addition to a worthy collection of VGN signage, lanterns, baggage equipment, bells, and headlights, there is a reasonably authentic train-order setup in the bay window. Most of all, there are great photographs of the Virginian and its relationship with Princeton.

In its day, Princeton could hold its own with any railroad town. On the northeast edge of downtown, the company shops sprawled over a wide plain alongside Brush Creek. Not much of it is left; the erecting hall was torn down a few years ago, and what few smaller buildings are left are emphatically marked “No Trespassing” by current owner RecycleWV, a metal recycler. 

But you can tell there was a big operation here. It had to be, because the Virginian fielded big-time motive power that was all out of proportion to the railroad’s small (600-plus route miles) size. 

In steam days, the VGN hauled coal with a roster of impressive articulated locomotives, topped off by the eight 2-6-6-6 AG-class “Blue Ridge” engines it bought from Lima in 1945, copies of C&O’s better-known Alleghenies. After the railroad’s partial electrification in the 1920s, Princeton became home to giant electric motors, first a fleet of brutish box cabs and later the streamlined EL-2B motors of 1948 and EL-C road-switchers delivered in 1955–57. Its pre-N&W diesel fleet was notable too, distinguished by 25 Fairbanks-Morse six-axle H24-66 units, known as Train Masters, painted in brilliant black and yellow.

All of that power congregated one time or another at Princeton, where generations of shop workers did work every bit the equivalent of that of their more famous counterparts in Roanoke or Altoona. 

Standing there near the depot, I tried to imagine the commotion of an earlier time, and the pride that went with it. If there was a “Princeton ethos,” perhaps it was captured by author H. Reid, whose The Virginian Railway (Kalmbach, 1961) remains the definitive book about the railroad.

“Virginian men were a proud lot,” wrote Reid. “They were happy that they, as a team, were able to make the Virginian the successful business operation that it was. Humble men worked together. This ranged from buddies in an engine cab encouraging a peanut fire to a president’s putting in for the best available locomotives.”

Now all that commotion is but a memory since NS decided to close the Virginian’s Clarks Gap route, shifting coal trains west from Elmore Yard in Mullens, W.Va., to Gilbert and south instead of running them eastward across the Virginian. I checked in with journalist and photographer Chase Gunnoe for additional details.

“NS is sticking to this operational policy, as we haven’t seen any westbound empties or eastbound loads since September 2015,” Chase told me. “The only business remaining on the VGN is a rock quarry customer right near the old shops in Princeton. The last time I visited the area they were transloading rock into hopper cars and sending them east as unit trains toward Roanoke.”

I was gratified to see one of those rock trains pulling into town just as we were getting ready to leave, its two GE units and a long unit train of hoppers easing past the station before coming to a stop. You don’t see a train every day in Princeton, which is a statement an earlier generation never thought would be made. 

Still, I smiled as I took one last look inside the museum and spotted a sign with a suitable message: “The Virginian Railway: The Best Coal Railroad Money Could Buy.”