Extending The Deepwater Railway To Meet The Tidewater Railway
In West Virginia, the owners, surveyors, and builders of the Deepwater Railway ran into lots of conflicts with both the C&O and the N&W. There was a nasty dispute with C&O forces over a contested tunnel site near Jenny Gap which landed in court. The Raleigh County court ruled for the C&O, but the West Virginia Supreme Court reversed the ruling in favor of the Deepwater Railway. In another court case, Page had what may have been a near-miss with a perjury charge. Upon interrogation by N&W attorneys in a West Virginia legal confrontation over right-of-way, Col. Page representing the Deepwater Railway, identified the estate of the late Abram S. Hewitt, a former mayor of New York as one of his investors. Page never mentioned Rogers, who it is now known had been an associate of Hewitt and may have been acting through the Hewitt estate. The N&W attorneys were unsuccessful in learning more at that time, or during many other confrontations as they attempted to stop the progress of the Deepwater in West Virginia. Ultimately, both the C&O and the N&W lost the battle and the Deepwater routing was successfully secured east to the Virginia state line near Glen Lyn.
At the same time, over in Virginia, in 1905, with the land and route secured, construction got underway on the Tidewater Railway, which as it turned out, went nowhere near its headquarters in Staunton on the C&O. Instead, it started building an alignment which would match up amazingly well with the Deepwater Railway near Glen Lyn, and run almost parallel to the N & W all the way to Norfolk. By the time the larger railroads finally realized what was happening, and that Page was involved in both the Deepwater and Tidewater Railways, their new competitor could not be successfully blocked on the basis of right-of-way. The building of another major railroad from the mountains-to-the-sea seemed to have been set in motion. Completion, however, was still far from assured.
Read more about this topic: Building The Virginian Railway
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