Roanoke Belt Line Right-of-Way Question

Mon Oct 28 11:13:42 EDT 2019

Stephen,

Great information here. Thanks.

Just to add a little to the mix . . . you said  “There is no explanation of what the N&W would provide later, in terms of a branch line to get the ore to market from the Tanglewood Mall area. BUT, I'm assuming this period of 1889-91 is when we're seeing a plan come together to move the washers out of Wasena, freeing up the Belt Line section, and creating a new ore washer and transfer station over at the Red Palace Restaurant at Tanglewood Mall.”

There would have probably been no need for an R&S/N&W “branch line to get the ore to market from the Tanglewood Mall area” because the Roanoke & Southern Ry. reached Roanoke in early 1892. I assume the Rorer NG would have then considered moving their washing operation from Wasena to Tanglewood and abandoning much of their R/W after that time including the portion btwn Murray Run and Wasena needed for construction of the the Loop Line. Due to the limited width of that portion of right-of way I rather doubt that both roads were ever located there at the same time. It would be interesting to know when construction of the Belt (or Loop) Line was begun/completed on the south side of the Roanoke River.

John Garner

From: NW Mailing List [mailto:nw-mailing-list at nwhs.org] 
Sent: Saturday, October 26, 2019 3:08 PM
To: NW Mailing List <nw-mailing-list at nwhs.org>
Subject: Re: Roanoke Belt Line Right-of-Way Question

Capt. Abram, et al - 

You've covered a lot of ground here, literally and figuratively. I like your assessments of where the Rorer line made its way from point A to point B. Here are a couple of thoughts, since I drive that stretch of Colonial Avenue every day:

- Your straight line proposal is subject to terrain, as you were 'inclined' to say. I can confirm there are definitely a few elevation issues that keep the Rorer line moving along the flat of Colonial Avenue, just past Persinger Road. However, the residential section beyond that consists of a single row of houses (from Persinger to Towers Mall) - behind which you can still see a natural swale that was probably the NG roadbed leading down towards Brandon Avenue. That trajectory runs past the back of a more recent construction of storage units (called Kustom Film & Tint on Google maps, approximately across from Broadway). This trajectory picks up at the short street called "Brandon Lane" and dumps out directly across from Wheeler Laundry on Brandon Avenue. Murray Run is behind that.

- The Alms House shown on the Winston Salem Division section map is the VERY same two-story brick building that you described as the Thomas Center for Advanced Studies. By the way, that building was reported to be very haunted up until the mid 1980s, when some expert went ahead and "freed" the ghosts who were holed up in that building. True Urban Myth in these parts...

- At the GOB-East archives session this morning, Mssers Harper, Shaw, and myself were busy unearthing new information about the Belt Line, Roanoke and Southern, and the Rorer NG line. Several items seem to point out that the N&W was trying to build a belt line, at first called the "Loop Line," as early as the late 1880s, and its configuration changed from an interior line to the north of the River, to an exterior line that was positioned in its final location to the south side of the river. 

- Joe, who has much more brain plasticity due to his youth, was quick to retrieve about seven different drawings which showed references to both the Belt Line and the Rorer NG, including the washers in Wasena Park. He also located a Nov., 1890 drawing (attached here) which shows how the N&W obtained property from the Lowman and Howbert families along the Roanoke River near Murray's run. I suspect it was only a planning map, not a final version of what really happened. It showed how the NG and standard gauge tracks would have to cross each other twice. I'm starting to believe this "diamond" which would be necessary for the NG to cross the N&W never actually came to pass. 

- Another document, found mysteriously by master sleuth Harper (aka "Bruce out of Blacksburg") showed a formal transcription of the deed conveyed in May, 1890 by the Consolidated Mining Company (*successor to Rorer Iron) to the N&W. It discusses a lot of NG track properties on the County end. There is no explanation of what the N&W would provide later, in terms of a branch line to get the ore to market from the Tanglewood Mall area. BUT, I'm assuming this period of 1889-91 is when we're seeing a plan come together to move the washers out of Wasena, freeing up the Belt Line section, and creating a new ore washer and transfer station over at the Red Palace Restaurant at Tanglewood Mall. 

- What stands out to me is a comment on the Section Map I shared yesterday. Just below the Alms House it describes a commitment to add, per Roanoke City Council, a siding that will hold no less than four cars and to be opened as a flag station. Joe and I debated today whether that was to serve as the actual point of connection for the Consolidated Mining Co's track leading back over to the Chinese Restaurant. Methinks that's a topic for another day.

Stephen Warren, Roanoke

On Fri, Oct 25, 2019 at 1:15 PM NW Mailing List <nw-mailing-list at nwhs.org <mailto:nw-mailing-list at nwhs.org> > wrote:

Cardinal Warren's drawing, posted yesterday and showing the Rorer R/W crossing the Roanoke & Southern about 100 feet south of MP 8, hath ye done sent me to the satellite imagery in the Google Earth program.

The goals were:  (1)  Find the spot where Rorer R/W crossed R&S R/W, and (2) to project a line from that point to Murray Run.

A PDF is attached, showing four satellite images with some notes added.

I had the standard, usual and customary problems:  (1) MP 8 could not be seen in the satellite imagery.  So, (2) I had to locate MP 8 by measuring from the track chart mileages for O.H. bridges, which are generally expressed to 2 decimal places;  but when O.H. bridges are over 100 feet wide, who knows whether the track chart dude measured from the exact center lines of the bridges?  So right off the bat, you have a potential error of 50 feet.

The Virginia Division track Chart indicates that MP 8 is 0.67 miles south of the Wonju St OH Bridge, and 0.29 miles south of the Rt581/Rt220 OH Bridge.  I began my question for MP 8 from these two points.  

Fortunately, the mile between MP 7 and MP 8 is indicated as a 5,280 foot mile (many are not so, you know.)  So, to find MP 8, I measured 3538 feet southward from the center line of Wonju St OH Bridge, and 1531 feet southward from the centerline of the Rt 220 OH Bridge.  

Those two measurements for finding MP 8 yielded results differing by 210 feet.  To each of these two measurements I added the 100 feet, and marked the two points with yellow push pins reading *Wonju + 100 ft* and *Rt581 + 100 ft.*  Those two push pins should bracket the area where Mr. Rorer crossed the Roanoke & Southern.  Sheet 1 of the PDF shows these two push pins and identifications identifications. 

An on-ground reference is the angled corner of the parking lot located about 865 feet north of the Thomas Center Building of Virginia Western College.

Sheets 2, 3 and 4 of the PDF show a heavy blue line projected onto the satellite imagery, from the assumed Rorer/R&S crossing near MP 8 down to Murray Run.  The distance referenced by this line is 0.97 miles long.  The elevation at Murray Run is approximately 930 feet; at R&S MP 8, the elevation is approximately 1014 feet; the disparity between the two elevations is approximately 84 feet.  On Sheet 4, the view looks southward from Murray Run, up the small declivity now occupied by Brandon Lane, towards Colonial Avenue and R&S MP 8. 

If Mr. Rorer's engineers had the luxury of locating their railroad on a perfectly straight alignment from MP 8 down to Murray Run, their alignment would have crossed Colonial Avenue at an acute angle, approximately 170 feet west that Avenue's present intersection with Persinger Road.  Unfortunately, that area is one I never explored as a kid, because I had no inkling the narrow gauge had run that way.

In these images, the vertical disparity exaggeration is ramped up to its maximum, for the purposes of making the hills and valleys more apparent.

No carping, please, about where the end of the blue line ended at Murray Run.  Google Earth is not a precision draughting program, and I did the best I could with the tools available.

Decades upon decades ago, Bob McNeill, a 1926 Punkin Vine Conductor who had earlier been a Fireman on the Danville & Western, showed me the spot where the Rorer railroad had crossed Rt. 220, in the vicinity of present Tanglehead Mall.  I looked at the Google Street Views and cannot identify the location, because everything has changed and the area no longer looks even remotely like I remember it.  So we shall send out Detective Bundy and Gum Shoe Blackstock, led by the capable Police Chief Warren, to bring back the goods...  Y'all git busy, Boys !

-- abram burnett,

Ancient Order of the Mystic Turnip

===========================================
                  Sent to You from my Telegraph Key
Successor to the MAGNETIC TELEGRAPH LINE of 1844
===========================================

---------- Original Message ---------- 
From: "Abram Burnett (КѢРѢЛЛОСЛАВЪ БЕРИНОВЪ)" <pravoslavna at comcast.net <mailto:pravoslavna at comcast.net> > 
To: N&W Mailing List <nw-mailing-list at nwhs.org <mailto:nw-mailing-list at nwhs.org> > 
Date: October 25, 2019 at 9:28 AM 
Subject: Re: Roanoke Belt Line Right-of-Way Question 

Warren-Garner-Rorer & Associates, LLC :

Thank you, Stefanos, for posting that drawing of the Rorer & Pacific N.G. crossing the Roanoke & Southern.

I grew up not far from that area.  From the time my father told me of having looked for the ore pits on Yellow Mountain in his own youth in the 1920s and 19e0s, the Rorer fascinated me.  I looked for it never found a trace.

The spot where the Tanglefoot [sic] Mall now sprawls was, in my childhood, an absolutely beautiful field, level as a table top and covered with scruff grasses about a foot tall.  There was one pine tree about six feet tall growing near the middle.  I never saw the field under cultivation, but for some reason it did not revert to heavy vegetation and tree and brush cover.  In the northeast corner of the field, approximately in the spot now occupied by the Chinese restaurant, was a small, unpainted, dilapidated cabin.  Of course, the level where the Tanglehead Mall now sits has been raised  by twenty or more feet from its original elevation.  When viewed from the track, this field was the single most idyllically peaceful scenic memory of my childhood.  

Later I worked two years in train service on the Punkin' Vine, and every time I passed that area, looking for the Rorer was on my mind.  An old-head Conductor, Casey O. Young, a 1926 hire, showed me the spot where the Rorer had been located, based on information furnished by men of the generation before him.  But I could never see anything there, and I never dreamt that the Rorer had crossed the R&S alignment, from east to west.

So your drawing, fixing the crossing of rights-of-way about a hundred feet south of MP 8, is a delight to me, a delight of the first order.  Thank You !

Also quite heuristic was the information you posted yesterday that the Rorer's route to Murray Run was WEST of the Tower's Shopping Center.  I have been up and down Brandon Road thousands of times (60+ years ago,) many of those times on foot,  and the possibility that I was crossing the Rorer R-of-W never entered my mind.  I watched the Towers mall being built.  The first fast-food *burger joint* I ever saw, and possibly the first one in Roanoke,  was located on Brandon Road, at the foot of the hill below the Towers, on the spot now occupied by the Kroger gas station; if memory serves, the burgers cost twenty cents.  One day I walked over from my newspaper route, purchased a burger, and quickly developed a dislike for greasy fast food.

The small road now identified as *Brandon Lane* was then a dirt road and may have yielded some traces  of the Rorer Fast Line, had I looked.

Back in the 1960s, I also searched for any indications of the Rorer west of Wasena, along Ferdinand Avenue, through the West End section of Roanoke, and looping back eastward to its connection with the N&W around 12th Street.  Findings?  Nil.

My thanks to all for these posts on the Rorer.

Raymond Barnes, History of Roanoke, 1968, indicates that Ferdinand Rorer, after his financial ruination, left Roanoke and "was never heard from again" (or words to that effect.)  Hopefully, in the future, something will be found of old Ferd's subsequent life and ventures.  (I worked alongside Raymond Barnes, Esq., in the microfilm room of the Roanoke Library, in the early 1960s, when he was doing the research for that book. Boy, was he a piece of work !!! )

Keep up the good research on Rorer.  If anyone deigns to re-incarnate Rorer's Narrow Gauge Railroad, I shall assist by purchasing a few shares of stock.  And if you decide to operate the railroad by the Telegraph, I am your guy.

-- abramo burnardo

i # Turnips, ver. 2.0

===========================================
                  Sent to You from my Telegraph Key
Successor to the MAGNETIC TELEGRAPH LINE of 1844
===========================================

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