Roanoke, VA Relocation Packages
Big Lick became a stop on the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad in the 1850′s which linked Lynchburg with Bristol on the Virginia-Tennessee border.
After the American Civil War (1861–1865), William Mahone, a civil engineer and hero of the Battle of the Crater, was the campaign force in the linkage of 3 railroads, including the V&T, across the southern tier of Virginia to form the Atlantic, Mississippi & Ohio Railroad (AM&O), a new line extending from Norfolk to Bristol, Virginia in 1870. However, the Financial Panic of 1873 wrecked the AM&O’s finances. Mahone role as a railroad builder ended in 1881 after several years of operating under receiverships, when northern financial interests took control. At the foreclosure auction bridge, the AM&O was purchased by E.W. Clark and Co., a private banking firm in Philadelphia which controlled the Shenandoah Valley Railroad then under construction up the valley from Hagerstown, Maryland. The AM&O was renamed Norfolk and Western Railway (N&W).
Frederick J. Kimball, a civil engineer and partner in the Clark firm, headed the new line and the new Shenandoah Valley Railroad. For the junction for the Shenandoah Valley and the Norfolk and Western roads, Kimball and his board of directors selected the small Virginia village known as Big Lick, on the Roanoke River. Although the grateful citizens offered to rename their town “Kimball”, at his suggestion, they in agreement(p) to name it Roanoke after the river. As the N&W brought people and jobs, the Town of Roanoke quickly became an independent city in 1884. In fact, Roanoke became a city so quickly that it earned the nickname “Magic City”.
Kimball’s interest in geology was instrumental in the underdeveloped of the Pocahontas coalfields in western Virginia and West Virginia. He pushed N&W lines through the wilds of West Virginia, north to Columbus, Ohio and Cincinnati, Ohio, and south to Durham, North Carolina and Winston-Salem, North Carolina. This gave the railroad the route structure it was to use for more than 60 years.
The Virginian Railway (VGN), an engineering marvel of its day, was conceived and built by William Nelson Page and Henry Huttleston Rogers. Following the Roanoke River, the VGN was built through the City of Roanoke early in the twentieth century. It merged with the N&W in 1959.
The opening of the coalfields made N&W flourishing and Pocahontas bituminous coal world-famous. Transported by the N&W and neighboring Virginian Railway (VGN), local coal fueled half the world’s navies. Today it stokes steel mills and power plants all over the globe.
The Norfolk & Western was noted for manufacturing steam locomotives in-house. It was N&W’s Roanoke Shops that made the company known industry-wide for its excellence in steam power. The Roanoke Shops, with its work force of thousands, is where the famed classes A, J, and Y6 locomotives were designed, built, and maintained. Until 1953 new steam locomotives were built there , long after diesel-electric had emerged as the motive power of choice for most North American railroads. About 1960, N&W was the last major railroad in the United States to convert from steam to diesel power.
The bearing of the railroad also made Roanoke attractive to manufacturers. American Viscose open a large rayon plant in Southeast Roanoke in October 1917. This plant closed in 1958, leaving 5,000 workers unemployed. When N&W converted to diesel, 2,000 railroad workers were laid off.
Free Relocation Packages for Roanoke, VA