Mixed Freight

Finally! I have been looking for you all everywhere. Where have you been?

Okay, I’m the one who has been missing. Other commitments have kept my schedule too clogged to blog. Thanks for your patience and continuing interest in VMT and transportation. I’m back now with a mixed freight of information (some of this and some of that).

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The summer edition of Revolutions, our museum newsletter, is done. It will be mailed out later this week. Those of you who receive digital copies should already have yours.

The new issue is different in some ways. For one thing, it contains six pages instead of four. For another, it gives special attention to VMT’s forty-fifth anniversary, through Bev Fitzpatrick’s View from the Cab and a photo spread of the early years at Wasena Park. This newsletter covers 1963-85, including the devastating ’85 flood that destroyed the original Roanoke Transportation Museum. The fall edition will focus on 1985 to the present.

The summer Revolutions also features several other topics. They include the recent Star City Motor Madness, the African American Heritage Day during Juneteenth festivities, the Lynchburg Rail Day/VMT bus trip, the new photo exhibit, the Rescue Challenge team’s hoisting of the RF&P box car, and recent news from our Board of Directors.

To receive either the paper or the e-mailed pdf version of the newsletter, call 342-5670 or e-mail info@vmt.org.

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Cocktails for a Cause comes to Trio next Wednesday, July 30. The VMT fundraiser works like this. Show up between 5-8 pm for cocktails, then move to the dining room for dinner, and Trio will donate a portion of your bar and meal receipts to the museum. You’ll find Trio at 315 Market St. SE. Train service not available.

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I wrote earlier about the multiple attractions that make this area a rail lover’s dream [Railroad Heaven, May 12]. Add another to the list.

Hotel Roanoke, originally built by the N&W for its riders, still maintains a vital connection to trains. Recently the hotel launched http://www.roanokerailcam.com/. The cam sits atop the classic building, looking out over the mainline tracks of Norfolk Southern. Now you can check out track happenings without leaving your recliner five miles away or 500 miles away (assuming you can reach a computer from your recliner).

Roanoke Rail Cam offers links to the Link and Transportation museums and the N&W Historical Society. Co-sponsor of the site is the Virginia Tech Foundation, headed by that famed train watcher himself, Ray Smoot. The Hotel Roanoke and Conference Center also offers a Train Lover’s Package with accommodations overlooking the railroad—you can be your own rail cam—plus breakfast and a commemorative mug and book.

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Did I just say “railroad lover’s dream”? Today I saw outside the museum an NS work train consisting of automated track laying equipment and those ribbons of continuous welded rail stretching seamlessly from car to car to car. The modern process of laying track still amazes me. And to see the equipment at point blank range—I drove up and down Shenandoah Avenue several times, drinking it all in—provides yet another argument why VMT is a special place. Every day the railroad past rubs shoulders with the railroad present.

Railroad Heaven

Have you thought about how large the rail footprint in the Roanoke Valley has become? We are a train lover’s Bigfoot, a rail fan’s gold mine. Those of us who live here may forget sometimes how much we do have to offer.

You can tour the Museum of Transportation and its extensive collection of locomotives, rolling stock and other artifacts. Adding to its value is its location within the former Norfolk & Western Roanoke freight terminal.

You can travel the David and Susan Goode Railwalk, filled with graphics, data and hands-on exhibits. Strolling alongside the mainline of one of the four largest railroads in America, you can observe all kinds of Norfolk Southern trains in action. At times you will see not only NS locomotives but also those in the livery of CSX, Burlington Northern Santa Fe and Union Pacific, among others.

Nearby you can find much more of Norfolk Southern’s regional operations to take in. A dual track hump classification yard with both receiving and departure yards on each end lies just west of downtown at Shaffers Crossing. Fueling and sanding facilities and a locomotive and car maintenance center are located there as well. Downtown the current NS office building, modern and sophisticated-looking, towers above the streets.

Across the tracks from VMT and the Railwalk stands Hotel Roanoke, the grand old lady built by Norfolk Southern’s predecessor, the N&W, for its passengers. On one side of that classic structure is the restored, Loewy-designed Roanoke passenger station. Within its walls lies the O. Winston Link Museum, featuring stunning photos of N&W steam locomotives against the vanishing rural landscape of this region.

Traipse over to the other side of Hotel Roanoke and you can gaze at two earlier Norfolk and Western office buildings, built when Roanoke was not just a regional but a national railroad headquarters. One structure now houses the Roanoke Higher Education Center where more than a dozen universities and colleges offer classes. The other building contains upscale apartment living. You can go inside the Higher Ed. Center and see the exquisite wood paneling and metal work that made this such an elegant home for railroad management.

Just down the tracks from the office buildings, hotel and passenger station you will find the sprawling East End Shops, where many of the locomotives featured in Winston Link’s photos were built. On one end, Norfolk Southern continues to perform heavy maintenance on GE locomotives, fabricate slugs and do some wreck repair. On the other end, FreightCar America manufactures ore cars for BNSF, coal hoppers for NS, BNSF and GATX, and double-stack container cars for Saudi Arabia.

The recent tour of “lost railroads” in the valley offered a reminder that there is still more railroad gold to be mined in this area. In addition, two other planned projects will make Bigfoot’s print even more expansive: the restoration of the Virginian Railway passenger station and the building of an intermodal terminal in Elliston.

How many places in America can you go and see in such close proximity the headquarters of one of the most successful and innovative steam railroads in history, the shops where some of North America’s most impressive locomotives were built, the collected work of one of America’s great railroad photographers, some of the classic locomotives he shot, the operations of a modern class 1 railroad bisecting the historic sites, a manufacturing center for new freight cars and (hopefully soon) a cutting-edge intermodal railroad center?

You can do so much railfanning here, drinking in the past and present and even the future, taking in the trains and the people and facilities that make them go. It leaves me wondering whether we are adequately marketing ourselves to the world.

Is there any coordinated attempt to “sell” to train buffs all we offer in the valley? Are visitors to the area introduced to the full range of interconnected rail attractions we offer? Do we have railfan maps of the area to hand out to tourists?

Scranton, PA has Steam Town, a somewhat motley repository of locomotives gussied up by huge amounts of federal government money. Perhaps we should call ourselves Train Town or Railroad Roanoke, or something like that (I bet you can think of a better name than the ones I just suggested).

Surely we can do more to promote our railroad riches. Looking around convinces me that we are a wonderful secret that has been too well kept.