Editor’s Note: Some, perhaps all, of the railroad museums discussed in this article are temporarily closed due to the coronavirus pandemic.Amazingly, dozens of the railroad stations built during the glory years of West Virginia railroading are still standing.
Many of them have been repurposed.
Today, for example, the passenger station built by the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad in Wheeling is used by West Virginia Northern Community College. Other former rail stations have been modified to house businesses, tourist railroads, visitors’ centers, municipal offices and restaurants.
Some are vacant and neglected — their days numbered.
But a handful of West Virginia’s old rail stations have been brought back to life. They’ve been restored as museums that offer visitors young and old a fascinating look back at the state’s railroading past.
Here’s a look at some of the state’s old stations that now have a new life.
Thurmond
The year 1873 marked the completion of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway’s mainline through West Virginia. It was also the year that Captain W.D. Thurmond acquired 73 acres along the railroad, a strategic location for developing the town that would bear his name.
Straddling the C&O tracks deep in the New River Gorge, Thurmond became a classic boom town as the region’s coal and timber industries expanded.
By 1910, it produced more freight tonnage than Cincinnati, Ohio, or Richmond, Virginia. Nor was freight the only key to Thurmond’s success. Fifteen passenger trains a day came through the town. Its busy depot served as many as 95,000 passengers a day.
The original depot, which dated from 1888, burned in 1903 and was replaced in 1904 with a phenomenally long, thin building. Its two stories are clad throughout in board-and-batten siding, and its gabled roof is covered with slate.
On the second floor, a multi-windowed bay served as signal tower. Inside were three waiting rooms — separate spaces for white men and white women and a single room for black people.
At its peak, Thurmond had two hotels, two banks, restaurants, clothing stores, a jewelry store, a movie theater, several dry-goods stores and many business offices. The town continued to thrive through the early decades of the 20th century.
Writing in “The West Virginia Encyclopedia” (West Virginia Humanities Council, 2006), historian Ken Sullivan noted that Thurmond developed a reputation as the Dodge City of the East. “But the brothels and saloons that gave Thurmond its bad name were located outside the city limits, across the New River in the ‘Ballyhack’ neighborhood. Captain Thurmond, who owned almost all Thurmond’s real estate during his lifetime, was a strict Baptist who forbade riotous living within his jurisdiction.”
The Dunglen Hotel, located across the river from Thurmond, was a notorious hotspot. A poker game at the Dunglen ran nonstop for 14 years, until an arsonist torched the place.
With the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, several businesses closed, including the National Bank of Thurmond. The town’s economic vitality waned after two large fires wiped out several major businesses.
By the mid-1930s there were other indications that Thurmond’s heyday was ending. The American public had begun its love affair with the automobile, and good roads made travel by car easy. The C&O changed from steam to diesel locomotives in the 1950s. Thurmond had been a steam town, its rail yard and crews geared toward the short service intervals of steam locomotives. The switch to diesels left many of the rail yard structures and jobs obsolete. At the same time, each year saw less and less coal mined locally.
Today, once-busy Thurmond is mostly a ghost town. In 1995, the National Park Service acquired the depot and restored it as a visitor center and museum. Exhibits and historic furnishings bring the glory days of railroading back to life.
Amtrak’s Cardinal still serves the Thurmond depot, but it’s a “flag stop.” This means if you are on the train and wish to get off at Thurmond you have to notify the conductor ahead of time. Otherwise the train rolls right on through. If you want to board the train at Thurmond, you have to make a reservation in advance, as no tickets are sold at the depot.
The Thurmond depot is open daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. from June through August.
Princeton
In 1907, the Virginian Railway was formed when the Deepwater Railway Corp. combined with the Tidewater Railway Co. Tycoon Henry Huttleston Rogers spent $30 million of his own money to build the new railway which stretched 443 miles from Sewells Point in Norfolk, Virginia, to Deepwater, West Virginia.
The Virginian quickly became a serious competitor with the long-established Chesapeake & Ohio and Norfolk & Westerns. Unlike the C&O and the N&W, it took a more direct route, crossing rivers and through tunnels rather than running parallel to rivers.
The Virginian operated from 1909 to November 1959, when it merged with the Norfolk & Western Railroad.
The Virginian built a hands-on station at 99 Mercer Street in Princeton in 1909 and continued to operate it until 1979, when it was demolished. Many in Princeton saw the demolition of the station as a grievous loss to the community, and a dedicated few resolved to do something about it.
As a result, the Princeton Railroad Museum, a replica of the old station, celebrated its grand opening on Sept. 30, 2006. This project was community-led and funded by grants and donations from individuals and groups. The Norfolk Southern Railroad donated the site of the original train station for the museum.
The museum is home to a wide array of exhibits and artifacts telling the story of the men and women who dedicated their lives to working the railroads, specifically the Virginian and the Norfolk and Western rail lines.
Sitting outside the museum is one of 25 steel cabooses made for the Virginian in 1948-49 by the St. Louis Car Co. The caboose once stood outside the Princeton Municipal Building, where wind, weather and time dimmed its paint and made the inside unsafe for visitors.
After being turned over to the museum, the caboose was sandblasted, repainted and re-lettered, and the interior redecorated to replicate what a working caboose would have looked like when it was a traveling home to railroad conductors, brakemen and flagmen.
The museum is open every day, except holidays, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Matewan
The Mingo County town of Matewan was named after Matteawan, a town in upstate New York. Matteawan was the home town of Erskine Hazard, a civil engineer from the Norfolk and Western (N&W) Railway, who laid out the tiny West Virginia town in 1890. Local residents, however, changed the name’s spelling and pronunciation.
The N&W’s Matewan depot became one of the most significant stations along the N&W’s 673-mile main line.
The depot was a focal point of the Matewan Massacre, which saw Police Chief Sid Hatfield and a group of striking coal miners engage in a historic gun battle with a dozen Baldwin-Felts detectives hired by local mine owners. The bloody clash is often cited as the opening chapter of the West Virginia Mine War of 1920-21. Matewan also stood at the heart of the legendary Hatfield and McCoy feud.
When the N&W made its last stop in Matewan in 1969, the once proud depot was closed and eventually demolished. Route 49 now covers the site.
In 2000 an initiative began to rebuild the depot. Today, a replica of the old depot stands at the entrance of the town and serves as a welcome center and museum that offers information on the area’s colorful history, including the Matewan Massacre, the Hatfield-McCoy feud, and the development of the region’s coal industry.
St. Albans
St. Albans is near the western edge of Kanawha County, where the Coal River flows into the Kanawha. By 1817, settlement at what was called Coalsmouth had grown sufficiently to warrant a post office.
After experimenting with other names, the community was designated St. Albans in 1871. Collis P. Huntington, whose Chesapeake & Ohio Railway was then winding its way through the state, chose the name to honor the railroad’s chief counsel, H.C. Parsons, a native of St. Albans, Vermont.
Timber and coal drove the region’s early economy. Both were shipped from St. Albans, first on river barges, then on the C&O.
In 1906, the C&O built a small but impressive-looking depot at 404 4th Ave. in St. Albans. The frame building is clad in clapboard siding. It had a one-and-a-half-story central block with a one-story wing on each side. A waiting room and restrooms for whites were located in the central block, facilities for black people in one wing and a freight room in the other. Originally the structure had a square signal tower.
The station closed about 1963 and remained vacant until the City of St. Albans purchased the land from CSX Transportation in 1991, and CSX donated the station. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1997.
A joint effort by the City of St. Albans and the St. Albans Chesapeake & Ohio Modelers and Museum has restored the depot, now painted its original colors: bright yellow with white trim, above an orange brown base.
The restored depot is open to the public the second Saturday of each month.
Marlinton
Marlinton, the county seat of Pocahontas County, is generally considered to be the location of the first white settlement in the Greenbrier Valley. Jacob Marlin and Stephen Sewell arrived about 1749, but left after a few years.
By the early 1800s, two turnpikes — one coming west from Warm Springs and the other connecting Greenbrier and Randolph counties — made a junction at Marlin’s Bottom (as it was first known).
The name was changed to Marlinton in 1886. The site remained mostly farmland until the 1890s, except for a Presbyterian church and a hotel. When the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway constructed its line up the Greenbrier River about 1900, the town quickly developed.
The C&O built its Marlinton passenger station at 720 4th Ave. in 1901 and added a freight station in 1905. By 1910, Marlinton had a tannery, two banks, two newspapers, about 20 stores, a hospital, an opera house, a volunteer fire department, a school, a water system, electric power and a population of 1,086.
Marlinton saw its last passenger train in 1958, and in 1978 the C&O’s Greenbrier line was abandoned all together. In 1980, the railroad’s roadbed was gifted to the state of West Virginia, which developed it into the Greenbrier River Trail. The Marlinton depot was restored and in 1983 was opened to the public.
In 2008, the restored depot was all but destroyed in a devastating fire. In took eight years but a faithful replica was completed and dedicated in 2017, using as much of the old depot as possible.
Philippi
The Philippi Covered Bridge is one of West Virginia’s best-known landmarks. Close by it, at 146 North Main St., is a building that surely must be the state’s oddest looking train station.
The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad built its Philippi station in 1911 in a design that resembles one of the missions built in early California and elsewhere in the Southwest. Built of pressed buff brick, the one-story building has a hipped roof divided into three sections by protruding parapets, which are actually extensions of interior walls. The arched windows and doorways and the red tile roof add to the building’s Southwestern feel.
A Baltimore architect, M.A. Long, designed the curious looking station. In his “Buildings of West Virginia” (Oxford, 2004) architectural historian S. Allen Chambers notes that Long “designed major stations for the B&O at Grafton and Wheeling, as well as a smaller depot at Belington in Barbour County.”
After passenger service at Philippi ceased in 1956, the B&O used the former depot as a workshop. It was purchased by the city in 1979 and restored as a museum by the Barbour County Historical Society. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1986.
Pennsboro
Pennsboro, located in Ritchie County midway between Parkersburg and Clarksburg, was for many years the largest settlement between the two cities.
Its location on the Northwestern Turnpike made it an important trading center in the early 19th century, and it became even more so when the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad came through in the 1880s.
Pennsboro’s B&O depot is a one-story brick building that stands at the intersection of Broadway Street and Collins Avenue. It was built in two sections. The first section was built in 1883 and the second section added around 1900.
It was restored by the Ritchie County Historical Society as a railroad museum and community center.
Today, the old depot serves as a trailhead on the North Bend Rail Trail. It’s open for tours from 9 a.m. to noon on the first second and third Saturdays in June, July and August.
