The Virginia Central Railroad was chartered as the Louisa Railroad in 1836 by the Virginia Board of Public Works, and was renamed as the Virginia Central Railroad in 1850. It connected Richmond with the Orange and Alexandria Railroad at Gordonsville in 1854, and had expanded westward past the Blue Ridge Mountains into the Shenandoah Valley as the American Civil War began in 1861. Edmund Fontaine was the president of the Virginia Central Railroad for most of its history.
Heavily damaged, it was rebuilt after the War, and merged with the Covington and Ohio Railroad in 1868 to form the new Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad (C&O). Under the leadership of Collis P. Huntington, the C&O line was completed to the Ohio River in 1873, and the Peninsula Extension built east from Richmond reached the harbor of Hampton Roads at Newport News by 1882.
Read more about Virginia Central Railroad: History, Coal To Newport News, Modern Times, Other Uses of The Virginia Central Name
Famous quotes containing the words virginia, central and/or railroad:
“Being blunt with your feelings is very American. In this big country, I can be as brash as New York, as hedonistic as Los Angeles, as sensuous as San Francisco, as brainy as Boston, as proper as Philadelphia, as brawny as Chicago, as warm as Palm Springs, as friendly as my adopted home town of Dallas, Fort Worth, and as peaceful as the inland waterway that rubs up against my former home in Virginia Beach.”
—Martina Navratilova (b. 1956)
“For us necessity is not as of old an image without us, with whom we can do warfare; it is a magic web woven through and through us, like that magnetic system of which modern science speaks, penetrating us with a network subtler than our subtlest nerves, yet bearing in it the central forces of the world.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“... no other railroad station in the world manages so mysteriously to cloak with compassion the anguish of departure and the dubious ecstasies of return and arrival. Any waiting room in the world is filled with all this, and I have sat in many of them and accepted it, and I know from deliberate acquaintance that the whole human experience is more bearable at the Gare de Lyon in Paris than anywhere else.”
—M.F.K. Fisher (1908–1992)