The Norfolk and Western Railway (N&W) (reporting mark NW), a US class I railroad, was formed by more than 200 railroad mergers between 1838 and 1982. It had headquarters in Roanoke, Virginia for most of its 150 year existence.
The company was famous for manufacturing steam locomotives in-house at the Roanoke Shops as well as their own hopper cars. Around 1960, N&W was the last major American railroad to convert from steam to diesel motive power.
In December 1959 N&W merged with long-time rival Virginian Railway in the Pocahontas coal region and grew even more in size and profitability by mergers with other rail carriers including Nickel Plate Road and Wabash in adjacent areas to form a system serving 14 states and the Canadian province of Ontario, between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mississippi River and Great Lakes. At the end of 1970 N&W operated 7,595 miles of road on 14,881 miles of track, including P&WV but not including AC&Y, CW, the Dereco roads, Lorain & West Virginia, NJI&I and NF&D.
In 1982 the Norfolk & Western Railway was combined with the Southern Railway, another profitable carrier, to form the Norfolk Southern Corporation (NS), but it continued paper operations until it was merged into the Southern (by this point renamed Norfolk Southern Railway) in 1997.
Read more about Norfolk And Western Railway: City Point, Bridging The Dismal Swamp, William Mahone, Civil War, Atlantic, Mississippi & Ohio Railroad Created and Becomes Norfolk and Western, Frederick J. Kimball, Big Lick Becomes Roanoke, Reaching Ohio, Coal, Roanoke Shops: Building Precision Steam Locomotives In-house, Surviving Steam Locomotives, World Wars, Great Depression, and Efficiencies, Steam Types On The N&W, The Virginian Railway — An Engineering Marvel of Its Day, Passenger Operations, The Modern Railroad Merger Era 1960–1982, Autoracks: Competing With Trucking, Becoming Part of Norfolk Southern, Leaders of The Norfolk and Western
Famous quotes containing the words western and/or railway:
“The Oriental philosophy approaches easily loftier themes than the modern aspires to; and no wonder if it sometimes prattle about them. It only assigns their due rank respectively to Action and Contemplation, or rather does full justice to the latter. Western philosophers have not conceived of the significance of Contemplation in their sense.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Her personality had an architectonic quality; I think of her when I see some of the great London railway termini, especially St. Pancras, with its soot and turrets, and she overshadowed her own daughters, whom she did not understand—my mother, who liked things to be nice; my dotty aunt. But my mother had not the strength to put even some physical distance between them, let alone keep the old monster at emotional arm’s length.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)