Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, January 4, 1992 TAG: 9201040065
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GEORGE KEGLEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
BOOKLET TRACKS N&W'S HISTORY
Frederick J. Kimball led a party of five on a historic trip to Tazewell County where on May 22, 1881, they found coal outcroppings that set the direction of the Norfolk and Western Railroad.Kimball was president of Shenandoah Valley Railroad, and later president of N&W. His find near what became Pocahontas brought the new line from Glen Lyn in Giles County to Bluefield and Pocahontas. That railroad has hauled millions of tons from the mountains to mills and factories in the United States and overseas.
Development of coal and passenger traffic and the steam engines that pulled the trains is the theme of a new historic booklet, "Along the Norfolk and Western Olden Days and New Ways People, Places, Events," by Tam Park Vannoy; its price is $9.95.
An Ashe County, N.C., native who grew up in Welch, W.Va., Vannoy has been within sight and sound of trains most of his life. He edited Norfolk and Western Magazine from 1969 until he retired in Roanoke in 1982.
Although it has no table of contents or index, the booklet has a lot of information about the trains that have been running through the Roanoke Valley since the first Virginia and Tennessee Railroad engine arrived in Big Lick on Nov. 1, 1852.
The 122 years of steam-powered trains ended in May 1960, Vannoy said, "when a giant Y6's fire was put to bed at Williamson, W.Va." The N&W was the last major railroad in the nation to use coal and steam in quantity.
In the glory days of steam, hundreds of the big engines were made in the Roanoke Shops from 1927 to 1953. The J's weighed more than 475 tons.
Family employment was common on the old N&W. Four railroad employees in one family said there was no pressure to join the company, "just a fascination with the high pay scale and a love of railroading," he said.
Vannoy's booklet tells of the branch lines from Abingdon to West Jefferson, N.C., and from Roanoke to Winston-Salem, N.C.
The mini-history is accompanied by 48 photographs, many taken by Vannoy, showing early railroad locomotives, employees and buildings. A woman carrying a black parasol was snapped as she sat on a railcar near Bramwell, W.Va., home of 14 coal-rich millionaires in the early days of the coalfields.
"Along the Norfolk and Western Olden Days and New Ways People, Places, Events" is available at Paperback Exchange bookstores at Williamson Road Plaza in Roanoke and Lee-Hi Shopping Center on Apperson Drive in Salem; Ram's Head Book Shop and the Virginia Museum of Transportation.