The Locomotive Shops and the Class J Six Eleven
Near Roanoke, Virginia
At the peak of the Norfolk and Western's steam era, the Roanoke Shops employed more than six thousand workers in the nineteen thirties on a sprawling campus of foundries, blacksmith shops, machine rooms, and erecting bays. The complex stretched for blocks along the valley floor just north of downtown. Men who worked there called it simply the shops, and the phrase carried the weight of a whole way of life: the union card, the pension, the seniority board, the shift whistle you could hear from half a mile away on a still morning.
The shops built locomotives from scratch, which was unusual. Most railroads bought their engines from outside manufacturers. The Norfolk and Western designed and fabricated its own, and that tradition of in-house engineering produced some of the finest steam power of the twentieth century.
The crown jewel was the Class J passenger locomotive, introduced in nineteen forty-one and refined through the decade. The Class J six eleven, built in Roanoke in nineteen fifty, could pull fifteen cars at one hundred ten miles per hour on level track. Railroad engineers and historians who have assessed the design consistently rank it among the most elegant and powerful steam locomotives ever built in America.
Number six eleven survived the end of steam and became the centerpiece of the Virginia Museum of Transportation in Roanoke, which you can visit today on Norfolk Avenue. The locomotive spent years on excursion runs through the Blue Ridge in the nineteen eighties and early nineteen nineties before rising insurance and maintenance costs ended the program in nineteen ninety-four. The engine was restored to running order in twenty fifteen, pulled excursions again for two years, and now pulls scenic trains in Virginia, serving as both a working machine and a monument to the industrial culture that built the city.
The shops themselves have been largely demolished, their footprint absorbed by the North End neighborhood and mixed-use development. But the Virginia Museum of Transportation preserves not only the six eleven but also a broad collection of rolling stock and rail artifacts that makes the industrial history of the region tangible in a way that photographs alone cannot.
