The Virginian Station: Coal Empire's Quiet Rival in Roanoke
Near Roanoke, Virginia
Roanoke in the early twentieth century was, above all else, a railroad city, the home of the Norfolk and Western Railway's shops, its corporate headquarters, its machine works. So when a competing railroad arrived in town in nineteen oh nine and built its own station four blocks from the N-and-W's great yard, it was an act of considerable audacity.
The Virginian Railway had been financed by financier Henry Huttleston Rogers, the Standard Oil man, Mark Twain's close friend and the person who quietly paid off the author's debts, specifically to break the Norfolk and Western's grip on southwestern Virginia coal traffic. Rogers built the Virginian from scratch in just three years, running it from the coalfields of Mercer County, West Virginia, all the way to a coal pier at Norfolk, with Roanoke as its only significant inland stop.
The station the Virginian built was modest by the standards of the N-and-W's grand Beaux-Arts edifice, but it was handsome and purposeful: a hundred and sixty-two feet long, faced in blond brick with a tile roof and terrazzo floors inside. It opened for passenger service in nineteen ten.
The Virginian turned out to be a technically brilliant railroad, its electrified mountain division was one of the great engineering achievements of early twentieth-century American railroading, moving enormous coal tonnage over the Alleghenies with an efficiency the steam-powered N-and-W could not match. But passenger service was never the point. In January of nineteen fifty-six, the Virginian discontinued all passenger operations. The blond brick station went quiet.
For decades it served as a feed and seed store. In two thousand one a fire badly damaged the building. Norfolk Southern, successor to the Norfolk and Western, which had absorbed the Virginian in nineteen fifty-nine, donated the shell to the Roanoke Chapter of the National Railway Historical Society, and a slow restoration followed. The station stands today on the National Register of Historic Places, a compact remnant of the railroad rivalry that once made Roanoke one of the most important junction cities in the American South.
