Final Attempts To Block
Norfolk and Western clearly stood the most to lose by the Deepwater-Tidewater combination. Once rights-of-way had been granted, N&W President Lucius E. Johnson (who had succeeded Frederick J. Kimball) tried a different tactic to block (or at least slow construction and increase costs) on the Tidewater Railway. He filed papers with the newly-formed Virginia State Corporation Commission, which had replaced the Virginia Board of Public Works in 1903 and regulated Virginia's railroads, to attempt to force costly overpasses at proposed at-grade crossings with the N&W in Roanoke and South Norfolk citing "great concern about the potential safety hazards" which would allegedly result.
The state authorities in Virginia ruled against N&W at both locations, and ordered it to accept interlocking (at grade) crossings with the new Tidewater Railway. The new railroad did accommodate the N&W with grade separations for crossings at Wabun, west of Salem and Kilby, just west of Suffolk. However, these caused no major construction delays, as N&W's Johnson had hoped, and, if anything, the construction of the new Tidewater Railway continued at an even faster pace.
Read more about this topic: Building The Virginian Railway
Famous quotes containing the words final, attempts and/or block:
“Again and again, faith in a possible satisfaction of the human race breaks through at the very moments of most zealous discord because humankind will never be able to live and work without this consoling delusion of its ascent into morality, without this dream of final and ultimate accord.”
—Stefan Zweig (18811942)
“Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)