Observer Online | History | The W&OD Railroad is Heart of Herndon for 120 Years

The W&OD Railroad is Heart of Herndon for 120 Years

by Peggy D. Vetter

Observer Staff Writer

From the day the first train passed through town on May 17, 1860, enroute from Alexandria to Leesburg, until the last sad trip on August 28, 1968, the railroad was the heart of Herndon. Now only the depot remains to remind us of that 120-year span.

The Alexandria & Harper’s Ferry Railroad Co., incorporated in 1847 by the General Assembly, was formed by a group of businessmen who wanted to acquire for Alexandria some of the business then going to Baltimore (because of the B & O Railroad going to the Ohio River Valley).

Hope of getting this business faded when in 1848 the B & O established a junction at Harper’s Ferry diverting the Shenandoah Valley business to Baltimore. Construction was delayed because of lack of funds and in 1853 the Virginia Assembly amended the original charter, changing the name to the Alexandria, Loudoun & Hampshire Railroad Company. The chosen Loudoun & Hampshire railcourse was to run from Alexandria to the Blue Ridge Mountains with a nearly 3/4 mile tunnel at Bluemont, then known as Snicker’s Gap or Snickersville.

According to Ames W. Williams’ book, “Washington & Old Dominion Railroad,” one financial crisis after another occurred, but construction finally began in February of 1855 at the farm of Lewis Bailey, five miles from Alexandria, on a 100-foot right-of-way.

“By September 1959, the road had been graded from Alexandria to Clarke’s Gap and a single track of 52-pound rail extended from Alexandria to Herndon,” Williams tells us.

At the start of the Civil War, the line extended only as far west as Leesburg.

A January 1861 timetable shows two daily trains between Alexandria and Leesburg, the running time a little more than two hours, with station stops at Arlington Mills (Columbia Pike), Carlinsville, Falls Church, Vienna, Hunter’s Mill, Thornton’s, Herndon, Guilford (now Sterling), Farmwell (now Ashburn), and Leesburg.

The line carried mail for the Post Office Department as well as passengers. Mail continued on from Leesburg to Winchester by stage and mail coach, a six-hour trip. Traffic was so good that two additional trains were added in March of 1861.

When Virginia seceded from the Union in April of 1861, all construction on the road came to a halt and facilities of the line were seized by Federal troops. Leesburg area Confederates burned bridges and trestles and tore up tracks so that the line was useless beyond Vienna Station for the remainder of the war. The road was reportedly removed from the Herndon station for reasons now unknown.

The remaining section between Alexandria and Vienna became an important part of the U.S. Military Railroads and supplied Union forces before the first and second Bull Run campaigns, according to Williams.

Williams tells us that “A frequent complaint of the engineers on this short run was their foaming boilers, caused by thousands of soldiers washing clothes in Four Mile Run, a stream used by the railroad to supply water to its locomotives.”

The road remained in the hands of the military until June 8, 1865, the longest held of all the Virginia railroads.

The first big undertaking after the war ended was rebuilding of the 110-foot bridge over Difficult Run. This was completed on Jan. 8, 1866 and the track cleared to Herndon, with a daily freight train beginning operation on Jan. 9.

Two and a half miles of track had to be replaced beyond Herndon before service could be resumed as far as Guilford Station (now Sterling). A 140-foot trestle across Broad Run was finished in September, but it was necessary to build five more bridges and trestles, including the 278-foot span at Goose Creek, the longest and highest on the line, before service was resumed to Leesburg on June 1, 1867.

Turntables were installed at both Herndon and Leesburg.

An interesting item in the 1868 annual report recounted the running of a passenger train on a round trip between Alexandria and Leesburg, “including the wages of the conductor, engineer and fireman along with the cost of fuel, oil and tallow.”

Optimistic that at last their line would be continued on to the Ohio River, stockholders changed the name to the Washington and Ohio Railroad Company. The road reached the Hamilton area at a station named “Irene” in 1870.

An exciting event for Leesburg a few years later is described by Williams: “The 11 o’clock train arriving in Leesburg on the morning of Nov. 12, 1873 brought a special car from Washington bearing President Ulysses S. Grant and members of his Cabinet who spent the day visiting the exhibition of the Agricultural Society at the Fair Grounds and then dined with Col. John W. Fairfax. The train left the depot at 10 o’clock that night with the strains of the Leesburg town band competing with its strident whistle.”

The track arrived at Purcellville in April of 1874 and to Round Hill in December. The financial burden became impossible and the line went bankrupt in 1878, to be sold in 1882 to a corporation known as the Washington and Western Railroad Company, which promptly defaulted. The line changed hands and names again to become the Washington, Ohio and Western Railroad Company. It was then leased for 999 years by the Richmond and Danville Railroad for the express purpose of forestalling any further westward expansion which would endanger the R & D’s own plans.

After a complicated series of maneuvers, the line became the property of the Southern Railway Company which operated it until 1912. It was then known as the Washington and Ohio and was advertised as “the Piedmont Airline.”

Despite the grand plans of its original builders, the rails were extended only four more miles, from Round Hill to Snickersville early in 1900 to accommodate the great number of visitors to that popular mountain resort.

Williams tells us that “Snickersville subsequently assumed the more sophisticated name of Bluemont.” A multitude of boarding houses and summer hotels sprang up all along the line for Washingtonians seeking to escape from the Capitol’s oppressive heat in those days before air conditioning.

Many wealthy Washington businessmen came to the smaller towns such as Herndon to build summer homes, while others came out at some stop along the line to spend the day picnicking at the various resorts and dance pavilions. Hunters and fishermen also came out to the country to try their luck.

Belmont, a large 18th century estate now marked with a historical plaque on Route 7 between Herndon and Leesburg, was for a number of seasons a family outing and picnic ground operated by the railroad, with side tracks and a station built to accommodate the special trains bringing throngs of excursionists to the beautiful retreat. It later reverted to individual ownership.

The Washington and Old Dominion Railway, as it was to be known for the rest of its existence, came to life in 1911 when John R. McLean, publisher of The Washington Post, together with Senator Stephen B. Elkins of West Virginia, bought the large tract of land in Fairfax County adjacent to the Great Falls of the Potomac River, which they considered a natural attraction from which they could profit if it could be made accessible to excursionists.

The Great Falls branch was completed in 1906 and the venture was an immediate success. Williams describes it as “carrying thousands over the 14-mile scenic roadway in bright yellow-painted cars to the Company-owned picnic and amusement park at Great Falls.”

By 1912, the entire line was electrified and the company published a brochure extolling the cooling breezes, the quality and abundance of the meals provided by the hosts of the many boarding houses along the line and the home-like atmospheres of the various establishments. Room and board with three meals a day cost about $25 a month.

With the coming of the electric trains to Herndon came the commuters, who found it possible to work in Washington and live in the quiet country town. While there were many commuters, most of the revenue generated in Herndon was from the many large dairy farms in the area, which shipped their milk into Washington via what was literally a “milk train”. The clanking of milk cans being unloaded from the horse-drawn farm wagons was a familiar sound.

According to Williams, passenger revenue reached its peak in 1919 and dropped in volume each succeeding year while freight revenue increased. Passenger service dwindled as people took to the automobile, stockholders lost heavily in the 1929 stock market crash, and in 1932 the Washington and Old Dominion again went into receivership.

In an effort to recoup, all passenger service to Great Falls was stopped and the right-of-way-sold to Arlington and Fairfax Counties for outstanding taxes.

A new corporation was formed in 1936 with a very bleak future anticipated. In 1939, the line between Purcellville and Bluemont was abandoned, stations at West Falls Church, Sterling and Paeonian Springs were closed, and in April 1941, all passenger service stopped completely, and the passenger cars were scrapped.

WORLD WAR II

When the W&OD terminated passenger service in 1941, the electric locomotives acquired during the line’s heydays in the 1920s were obsolete, and the company bought diesel engines to replace them. The diesels arrived in time for the W&OD’s temporary World War II boom, when its freight revenues rose to $335,503 in 1942 alone.

In March of 1943, the Office of Defense Transportation forced the company to resume daily passenger service, for what was to be the last time, as a war emergency measure. Since the passenger cars, except for three combination mail coaches, had been scrapped, it was necessary to find suitable equipment, in a difficult wartime market. It is hard to believe in our present days of inflation, but the W&OD bought a gasoline-powered train of two cars from the Pennsylvania Railroad for “the sum of $10,000 less rentals paid,” according to Ames W. Williams. Commuter response was so good that an additional train was put on each day between Rosslyn and Purcellville.

The road thrived briefly due to such economies as replacing the telegraph and telephone communications and short-wave radio which allowed the train crews to talk to each other from most points on the road.

High point of the nine years of renewed commuter service was in 1945 when 89,121 passengers were carried, not enough to warrant continuance when the Post Office Department terminated its contract with the railroad and gave it to a trucking firm.

Due to the discontinuance of passenger service, the railroad was solvent at last by 1955, when the payroll had been cut to 69 employees. Prospects were so good that in 1956 the W&OD changed owners for the last time.

The ICC approved purchase of the W&OD by the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway, which was gambling on the chance that a large steam-generated power plant planned by PEPCO might be built on the Potomac River near Sterling, with a big coal hauling contract as the payoff.

The W&OD was caught in a three-way political tussle between PEPCO and the states of Virginia and Maryland, both of which wanted the plant on its own side of the Potomac, with Maryland winning.

The Chesapeake and Ohio “was left holding the bag, or more accurately, holding a small railroad it didn’t quite know what to do with”, says H.H. Harwood, Jr. in his book, “Rails to the Blue Ridge”.

It is interesting to speculate on what might have happened had the dreams of so many years before come true and the rustic rails finally reached West Virginia coal. But it didn’t happen, and the W&OD was left to go its own way again for awhile.

Says Harwood: “The C & O’s arrival on the scene happily coincided with the biggest business bonanza in the Old Dominion’s career, and the C & O materials and cash came forth to put the line in shape and take advantage of it.”

AIRPORT BONANZA

That bonanza was the selection of a big piece of flat farmland near Sterling by the Federal government for the building of its new Dulles International Airport.

“Suddenly, the low-pressure railroad found itself catapulted into the jet age, temporarily, at least,” Harwood continues.

Seeing prospects for long-range industrial development in the area, in addition to the airport construction, the C & O upgraded the eastern end of the W&OD for 100-ton loads, putting in new rails, ties and most of all, 13 new bridges between Potomac Yard and Sterling. Before upgrading the roads, four diesels averaged only 600 horsepower each and about 70 tons.

The iron truss bridge crossing Difficult Run east of what was once Hunter’s Mill Station, dated from 1884 and had an axle loading limit of no more than 15 tons, making it necessary for the 70-ton diesels to creep across it at a cautious 10 m.p.h. for many years until 1959 when it was replaced with a steel span.

Beyond Sterling, the line was left as it had been before, as no one could then envision any kind of development in Loudoun County’s peaceful farmlands!

The railroad, if not its customers, profited even more when in 1962, 2.9 miles of the Rosslyn branch was condemned to make way for I-66 and sold by the C & O for $900,000.. Nothing is now left to show that once four rail lines met at Key Bridge.

What Harwood labels a “Five Star Finale”, with dramatic ups and downs so typical of the long history of the Old Dominion, signaled the end when on Feb. 5, 1965, the railroad filed an application with the ICC to abandon the entire line.

The Virginia Department of Highways would buy most of the railroad property for $3.5 million, and use two miles of the road bed right-of-way as the route for I-66 through Falls Church.

FIVE STAR FINALE

According to Harwood, “Everyone was shocked but nobody was surprised.”

A group of Old Dominion customers formed in opposition to the sale and the battle was on. Public hearings began in May, 1965, and in Harwood’s words, “From the beginning it was obvious that this was going to be anything but a routine branch-line abandonment case.”

By the time it was over-three years later-it had turned into the most voluminous and controversial abandonment case ever handled by the ICC.

“The railroad, of course, hardly wanted to be saved by anyone, since it had the chance to go out of business at a handsome profit,” continues Harwood. “So in part, the hearings presented the curious spectacle of a management insisting its plight was hopeless, while its ‘enemies’ proposed everything they could to help it make money.”

Others said that the metropolitan area would lose an invaluable potential rapid transit right-of-way at a time when it was just forming plans to build such a system. The C & O’s own fortunes were declining and it needed the money the sale would bring.

The Virginia Highway Department claimed it would save nearly $5.4 million by using the railroad property through Falls Church for I-66 as it could avoid grade crossing separations on other road projects. Harwood’s description of the daily melee where the Old Dominion crossed I-95 is enough to make us understand why they won their case:

“W&OD’s morning run out of Potomac Yard coincided beautifully with the inbound rush hour on Shirley Highway: returning in the afternoon was often the same, with the result that masses of cars and trucks doing 60 m.p.h and more on a limited-access freeway suddenly found themselves facing a string of freight cars. Train crews were no happier venturing out into this wall of high-speed chromium, and at least once a W&OD diesel was knocked cleanly off the tracks.”

Two opposition groups proposed buying the line and operating it themselves, but Harwood concludes that “what everyone knew-but nobody said directly-was that the railroad was worth far more dead than alive.”

The ICC examiner recommended on March 7, 1966 that the line be abandoned with no strings attached, but opposition groups had the case reopened; Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority asked for a delay while it studied rapid transit uses for the railroad, and after more postponements, the formal decision was made in early Jan. 1968, that the line would die on Jan. 30. It didn’t. At noon of the day before, the W&OD Users Association got a temporary restraining order and the court pondered an appeal.

In the meantime, the railroads, engines, cars, property, stations and service were falling apart, and all agencies but those at Herndon and the company office in Arlington were closed.

The last appeal was dismissed, and the railroad allowed to be abandoned after July 28. The last train left Herndon on Aug. 21, 1968, and the last two empty lumber box cars were pulled from the Murphy & Ames siding in Falls Church on Aug. 27.

In Harwood’s words, “after 121 years of almost constant struggle, with little to show for it all, the Old Dominion ended as a superhighway roadbed and a transmission line right-of-way. It was inevitable. Hardly anyone was happy, but no one could say that it had not lived a full life.”