Building The Virginian Railway - Final Attempts To Block

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.