The Virginian Railway
Most notable among Page's many projects was a partnership with absentee investors, begun in 1898, to acquire land and construct a modest short-line railroad to tap new coal reserves in a rugged portion of southern West Virginia not yet reached by the bigger railroads. The project was intended to establish connections to both the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway (C&O) and the Norfolk and Western Railway (N&W), which should have inspired competition among rival carriers to transport the coal the rest of the way to market. However, collusion by the leaders of the large railroads (lawful in an era before U.S. anti-trust laws were enacted) resulted in rates to transport the coal the additional distances to markets which, potentially, would have stopped the project.
However, if the C&O and N&W presidents thought they could discourage Page from developing the new areas, they were mistaken. One of the silent investors Page had enlisted was millionaire industrialist Henry Huttleston Rogers, a principal in John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Trust. A master at competitive "warfare", Henry Rogers did not like to lose, and, as one of the wealthiest men in America, he also had nearly unlimited resources.
While Page continued to meet with the big railroads for rate negotiations that always seemed unproductive, he and Rogers secretly planned a route and acquired rights-of-way all of the way across Virginia to Hampton Roads, a distance of some 440 miles (710 km). By the time they realized what was happening, the C&O and N&W executives were faced with a new major competitor, a third railroad with direct access to an ocean port.
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Famous quotes containing the word railway:
“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)