"Takin' Twenty" with the Virginian Brethren by Skip Salmon

[NW Mailing List]

Last night I had the pleasure of "Takin' Twenty" with eight of the 
Brethren and Friends of the Virginian Railway. During the first part of 
the meeting we talked about the feedback concerning troop trains being 
unloaded in Norfolk. I told the Brethren about a phone conversation with 
VGN clerk Robert "Little Abner" Glass this week. He told me that he 
remembered troops being unloaded "just past Granby Street where there 
was an interchange with the Belt Line which run jointly with the VGN to 
Hampton Boulevard Army Base. There was a wye there and when the C&O was 
building their new pier many years ago at Newport News, the VGN dumped 
coal for them, and the VGN scale office was this interchange to the Army 
Base". Abner said that as a demurrage clerk, he traveled about 70 miles 
each day in the area checking car IDs and keeping records of set-offs 
etc. He said that the C&O coal cars had a small 3" square yellow tag to 
identify them as C&O coal.

For show and tell I showed the Brethren a January 1987 Norfolk Southern 
Passenger Equipment Diagram Book showing former N&W and Southern 
business cars, power cars, and other unusual equipment used by NS in 
road service.

In res ponce to last weeks report, a question was asked for me to 
discuss with the Brethren about why the VGN did not have a "house track" 
in Roanoke at the passenger station. Ken Miller said that the REA cars 
were unloaded into their trucks directly from the express cars on the 
main line. Raymond East recalled setting out a head end car using the 
cab track just west of the nearby Jefferson Street Bridge.

The Jewel from the Past is from October 28, 2004: "Keith 'Slim' Sowder 
recalled riding on a set of Squarehead side rods once. 'It was like 
riding on a horse drawn ground slide on dry land'. I found out that a 
ground slide is a sled. He also remembered while working at Se wells 
Point, watching a small jet from the nearby Norfolk Naval Base crash 
into a Virginian coal hopper and explode. He said that the hopper 
'didn't budge a bit'".

Jim Cosby, Roanoke Chapter NRHS treasurer, and chairman of the Virginian 
Station Restoration Committee, is also president of the Cave Spring 
Lions Club in Roanoke. Without his knowledge, the club had a set of 
their Lions Club pins made depicting a VGN EL-C, VGN caboose, coal 
hopper, pulpwood car, flat and box car. This set of pins will be 
distributed to Lions Club members all over the US and honored Jim's work 
with the station restoration. Jim presented me with a set of these pins 
and I showed them to the Brethren last night. At a recent meeting with 
City officials, Jim proudly wore the VGN EL-C pin on his lapel...

Also passed around were two photos that Jeff Sanders sent me showing 
Virginian Railway office workers, at work, in the Norfolk Union Terminal 
building VGN offices in April 1957. One showed Ann and Margie at their 
work station with a Coca Cola calendar on the bleak wall. The other is 
two dozen VGN office employees proudly posing. Wis Sowder and Ken McLain 
who worked at Sewells Point, did not recognize any of these workers. Wis 
said that he made the 8 mile trip from the yard to the office several 
times but "didn't stay long".

We discussed the Gordon Hamilton article from the April 6, 1911 
"Bluefield Daily Telegraph" about R. L. French who was "fined $100 by a 
federal court at Huntington for riding on a pass contrary to the Hepburn 
Act". "He rode a pass of his brother to save 75 cents. Since Mr. French 
was 'drinking and carousing on the train to such an extent that the 
conductor started to put him off'. Before doing this, he called an 
assistant trainmaster who was riding in another car telling him that an 
employee was drunk. The trainmaster declared that French was NOT a RR 
employee and he was arrested under the Hepburn law". The Brethren knew 
of no such charges on the VGN. Wis Sowder said that the VGN conductors 
knew most employees and "we didn't even have to show our passes".

Raymond East talked about working in his rock garden which prompted Wis 
Sowder to tell of a recent incident about rocks. Wis owns a lot of 
property near Bent Mountain and half of Back Creek that borders his 
property. Recently a gentleman approached Wis and asked if he would sell 
him two large moss-covered rocks in the creek. Wis, being a good old 
country gentleman farmer, as well as a clever retired VGN clerk, 
responded immediately "Yes, $200 each". The man hired a large crane and 
two dump trucks and removed the rocks from the middle of Back 
Creek...Wes "claimed his half in the middle"!

Time to pull the pin on this one!

Departing Now from V248,

Skip Salmon

__._,_.___

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://six.pairlist.net/pipermail/nw-mailing-list/attachments/20101021/d4f68e45/attachment.html>