It’s been said the Los Angeles Dodgers got their nickname from the need of their fans to dodge trolleys when the team played at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn. Through the years Alexandrians have dodged a train or two themselves. At one point, a half-dozen railroads traversed the streets of the city and that’s not counting spurs.
A complete look at this history is way beyond our capacity, but we thought it would be fun and informative to put together a series of before and after maps that show some of the railroad lines.
Our journey begins in the 1850s.
All aboard!
(Note: Researching and reading about this subject will give one gray hair real fast. Railroads fail, railroads merge, railroads consolidate, railroads use other lines, and sometimes the trains don’t even go where the name says.
I will say Al Cox, Alexandria’s esteemed Historic Preservation Manager is to be thanked for cleaning out some of the cobwebs in his article published in the Historic Alexandria Quarterly, Winter 1996. In it, he thanks William E. Griffin, Jr. for his book, “One Hundred Years Along the RF&P Railroad.” Other valuable sources, including Ted Pulliam’s Historic Alexandria, are listed at the end).
Map One, 1877, (I used “A Map of Alexandria,” taken from the 1877 Hopkins City Atlas of Virginia, source “A Seaport Saga”).
Getting farm goods from the Shenandoah Valley and Virginia’s Piedmont to Alexandria’s port on the Potomac was always a slow process during the antebellum era (modern day truckers and farmers stuck in traffic might say it still is). Turnpikes were an improvement over the dirt wagon roads (Little River Turnpike, built in 1811, runs from Alexandria to Aldie), but it was the coming of the railroads in the 1840s and that ushered in better times.
Concerned that Baltimore was gaining more and more business, Alexandria magnates George Smoot, Lewis McKenzie and others helped finance a handful of railroads to and from the seaport. These lines helped pull Alexandria out of the economic malaise it had suffered in the 1830s.
The oldest part of the city was virtually surrounded by tracks. Wolfe Street west of Patrick held multiple tracks. That part of the street never reclaimed its original use as a road and vanished from existence.
Activity on busy Union Street was always dangerous and accidents to pedestrians occurred. For the second half of the 19th-century, Alexandria must have seemed like more of a railport than a seaport.
The lines were as follows:
Virginia Midland (Orange & Alexandria)
Streets Used: Union Street, Wilkes and Wolfe
May 29, 1851 was a banner day in the city of 8,000 inhabitants. A steam-powered locomotive hauling wheat blew its whistle on Union Street. The city would never be the same.
Carrying passengers and fertilizer for the piedmont farms, the Orange & Alexandria line used the Wilkes Street Tunnel to pass under Lee and Fairfax streets which sit on a small bluff, before making its way out of town via the Wolfe Street lines just south of Duke Street. It ran south and west to Manassas, Culpepper, Orange County Courthouse and then on to Gordonsville. The trains reached Lynchburg by 1860. As Charles Seigel points out,
As a result of being the northern terminus of the railroad, Alexandria became a thriving seaport and manufacturing center. In addition to faster and cheaper delivery of freight, by 1860 passengers could go from Washington to Lynchburg in eight hours instead of the three-day travel before the railroad’s completion.
The Orange and Alexandria also built a good-sized roundhouse and repair yard at the corner of Henry and Wolfe. During the Civil War, the boys in blue turned the yard into the headquarters for the Union Military Railroads.
It was here that a special railroad car was made for President Lincoln. Construction began in 1863. So very sadly, on the day it was ready for his use, John Wilkes Booth assassinated the President.
In 1867, the Orange and Alexandria line merged with the Manassas Gap RR, forming the Orange, Alexandria & Manassas Railroad. In 1873, it became part of Virginia Midland Railway and then part of the Southern Railway.
Amazingly, this landscape did not give up the ghost for many years. Some of the small buildings remained until the 1970s when the city paved a new curved way connecting Henry Street to Patrick between Duke and Wolfe. The entire footprint was not erased until the late 1980s when the Old Town Village neighborhood was built.
Subtle reminders include Roundhouse Lane and the eight-sided Rec Center building by the pool. The brick building occupied by one of the city’s oldest businesses, T.J. Fannon & Sons (1104 Duke), is orientated southeast to northeast due to the way the rail line curved behind it.
Washington City, Virginia Midland and Great Southern RR (Henry Street)
http://www.trainweb.org/PiedmontRR/railhst1.html
TrainWeb covers the history of this line:
In 1872 the Orange and Alexandria RR was merged with the Lynchburg & Danville RR to form the Virginia & North Carolina RR, which was renamed the following year as the Washington City, Virginia Midland & Great Southern RR (WCVM&GS), which entered receivership in 1876.
In 1881 the WCVM&GS RR was reorganized by the B&O RR and the name was shortened to Virginia Midland RR (VM RR). The VM RR was leased to the Richmond & Danville RR in 1886. The R&D RR along with the VM RR became part of the Southern railway in 1894.
There is a remnant of a line that can be seen at the northwest corner of Henry and Duke.
Washington and Ohio/The Alexandria, Loudoun and Hampshire Railroad. Line: Ran along N. Union Street, and ended at Princess and Fairfax.
Other names:
1847 Alexandria and Harper’s Ferry RR
1853 Reorganized as Alexandria, Loudoun and Hampshire
1870 Washington and Ohio
1884 Washington, Ohio and Western
1911 Washington and Old Dominion
1968 Abandoned
This line was chartered as the Alexandria and Harper’s Ferry in 1847 but did not start puffing steam until 1859. By then it had become the Alexandria, Loudoun and Hampshire, the first of many name changes.
The owners wanted to compete with the B&O Railroad for transporting coal from West Virginia. Those ambitions did not come to fruition and the line became used for freight, passengers and mail. Its stops included Arlington, Falls Church, Vienna, Hunter’s Mill, Herndon and Leesburg.
As David Guillaudeu points out in his book, “Washington & Old Dominion Railroad” (Images of Rail), the line had a total of a dozen names. The most familiar is the Washington and Old Dominion.
The line closed down in 1968. The roadbed was re-adapted for bike and trail use, the popular W&OD trail that runs from Shirlington to Purcellville.
Alexandria and Washington
Line: Ran along N. St. Asaph, terminated at Princess. Abandoned 1872.
The Hopkins 1877 maps shows a line running along N. St Asaph and ending at Princess. But there is no railroad line written in for it. Research conducted by Thunderbird Associates answers the question.
In 1872, the Pennsylvania Railroad acquired the Alexandria and Washington Railroad, and the St. Asaph Street entrance to the city was abandoned in favor of the two acquired lines running down Fayette and Henry streets (Cox 1996).
This line first started in 1854. When it reached the corner of N. St. Asaph and Madison, it made a soft turn to the left and ran along the Alexandria and Washington Turnpike. We know this route today as Powhatan Avenue, the widest street in Old Town. The line went northward to the Long Bridge. Today’s equivalent is Route 1 and the 14th Street Bridge.
Fran Bromberg points out the line had six trains daily. For many years, snafus and transferring waits occurred at the Long Bridge. For a period of time, passengers had to disembark, walk the bridge and then take a horse and buggy into the city of Washington.
Alexandria and Fredericksburg (Henry and Fayette)
In 1864, the City of Alexandria authorized the A&F to build a single track along Fayette Street north of Duke. In 1872, the Pennsylvania Railroad bought the line and created the Alexandria and Fredericksburg, which used the Henry and Fayette Street tracks. The station was located at Henry, Cameron, Fayette, and Queen. This line connected with the Richmond,
A remnant of the Fayette Street line was unearthed during construction of the Asher (620 Fayette where Bastille Restaurant is moving to and previously a warehouse). An historical marker was put up there last year.
The rails embedded in the brick sidewalk along this block of Fayette Street came from the Alexandria and Fredericksburg Railroad. Chartered in 1864 and completed to Quantico by 1872, this rail line ran in the street and spurred industrial growth in this part of town. Reuse of the rails in the sidewalk resulted from the 2012 redevelopment of the property.
Baltimore & Potomac (Wolfe Street)
The Baltimore and Potomac operated this line until 1901.
Smith and Perkins Locomotive Works, sw corner of Wolfe and Union
Mid-Continent website has a good look at this operation. The pair’s first engine rolled off the line in 1851 and was sold to the Orange and Alexandria. Employing 200 men, the plant included a machine shop, a foundry building, a blacksmith shop, a boiler shop, and a car shop. The Manassas Gap RR also bought their coal-fired locomotives.
The plant shut down in 1858. A wood vulcanizing company and later a barites mill were located at the corner spot.
The Alexandria Marine Railway, End of Franklin Street
An interpretive marker at Ford’s Landing walkway covers the history of this operation quite well.
The Alexandria Marine Railroad Company was founded in 1849 at the site of the former Keith’s Wharf. Until the depression of 1857, the firm refitted and repaired the sailing craft that plied the harbors of Alexandria, Georgetown and Washington. The marine railway used an engine to pull small to medium-sized craft up onto a track and was an alternative to a dry dock.
As the local economy slowly recovered after the Civil War, the Alexandria Marine Railway and Ship Building Company was formed in 1874 to reestablish the earlier marine railway and shipyard. The company constructed new shipways and tracks and rebuilt or reused features of the old yard and military wharf.
The company repaired the substantial fleet of schooners carrying coal, fertilizer, building materials, ice and other bulk commodities on the Potomac. The company also repaired smaller craft and constructed an average of 10 vessels a year.
The first large ship built was the 150-foot, 631-ton, three-masted, oceangoing Robert Portner, launched in1876. Purchased by a New England syndicate in the 1880s, the shipyard began producing still larger schooners, including the four-masted William T. Hart, the largest vessel built in Alexandria. The company also produced some steam vessels, including tug boats.
The shipyard operated into the 20th Century, constructing and repairing river work boats like the George, a 50-foot Potomac longboat designed for hauling cordwood and stone.
Archaeologists uncovered and recorded sections of the railway, the foundations of shipyard structures, and several 19th-century boats and barges during excavations at this site in the early 1990s. The archaeological resources remain in place beneath Ford’s Landing development.
Civil War Railroad Wharf, Foot of Franklin Street
Some of President Lincoln’s generals gave him fits. Not the case with Herman Haupt. The graduate of West Point is best known for whipping the railroads into shape during the Civil War and engineering feats done at speeds not thought possible.
Perhaps lesser known were his achievements while in Alexandria where he took control of the United States Military Railroad in 1862. As author Bernard Kempinski points outs, Haupt “designed, requisitioned materials and built unique railroad float barges to transport cars loaded at Alexandria. The floats consisted of two large-sized Schuylkill barges, across which long timbers were placed supporting eight tracks. On these tracks loaded cars were run at Alexandria, towed sixty miles by steam tug to Aquia Landing.
An interpretive marker at Ford’s Landing touches on this story and the railroad wharf that was located there.
Brigadier General Herman Haupt, commander of the U.S. Military Railroad, was charged with sending men and supplies south into Virginia as quickly as possible, often to places where there had been no railways before the war. He also had to repair Union track, bridges and rolling stock destroyed by the Confederate armies and guerrillas.
Haupt established a railroad wharf at this site that connected the railroad tracks from Washington and Virginia to the river. At the wharf, the train cars were transferred directly onto barges, made up of two canal boats lashed together over which rails had been laid, and were pushed down river by steam tugs to the railhead at Aquia Creek where the cars could be transferred back to rail. The barges avoided the necessity of unloading the cars for the river portion of the journey and were the forerunner to modern containerized freight. Haupt also experimented here with pontoon boats, rafts, and prefabricated transport vessels and with methods of destroying enemy track.
Map Two, 1917
(I used Washington and Vicinity, U.S. Geological Survey, 1917). They do not label the lines once they reach the city limits).
The bubble burst for railroad building in 1893, setting off a stock market crash and depression that lasted four years. Alexandria recovered after the turn of the century, seeing an increase in the manufacturing of goods.
The big news in town was the increase in rail activity west and north of downtown. Potomac Yards, which opened north of the city in 1906. It became a sprawling center of activity that employed 1,400 workers on 450 acres with 52 miles of track, making it the largest classification yards on the east coast.
Also coming on the scene was the new Washington Alexandria and Mount Vernon Electric line that helped create the suburbs in and around Del Ray and gave birth to rapid transit in Alexandria. A group of businessmen, some from Philadelphia, formed the Alexandria Land and River Improvement Company. In the early part of the 1890s, they built both the manufacturing town of New Alexandria and the Washington, Alexandria, Mount Vernon Electric Railway. This line (name change to the Washington and Virginia) ran from Washington to Mount Vernon and had over two dozen stops.
It’s worth pointing out that the WAMV line also established interurban service in Alexandria. Streetcars ran frequently along King so one had to watch out crossing the street. The New Alexandria manufacturing town collapsed partly due to the economic downturn, but the line the company built, the Washington, Alexandria, Mount Vernon Electric Railway, continued on until the 1930s.
On the west side of town, Alexandria’s Union Station opened in 1905 (technically still part of Arlington County until the city annexed it in 1915). Current day riders on Amtrak and VRE know this stretch well, which parallels Metro and is also used by CSX. As part of the construction, iron bridges were built over King Street and Commonwealth Avenue in 1904.
Union Station (called Alexandria Station to avoid confusion with Washington’s Union Station) served passengers on the Southern RR, the Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac, and Chesapeake and Ohio. Double tracking was laid down. This new location shifted activity away from Fayette and Henry. This mile long stretch posed its own hazards for pedestrians.
In 1901, Southern Railway built Cameron Yards, a railroad switching yard just west of Hooff’s Run in modern day Carlyle. A large brick house was used for repair of steam locomotives and cars. When Potomac Yards opened in 1906, it took the switching duties away, but Cameron Station remained as a repair facility.
To keep fruit and perishables cold, ice storage companies also operated at Cameron Yards (not to be confused with Cameron Station). Armour Car Lines was the first in 1902, followed by the Fruit Growers Express. The latter also had a repair shop with about 30 buildings (Maybe it’s just me but I’ve always felt Cameron Yards has flied under the radar historically.) Mutual Ice Company also operated a plant there as well as Potomac Yard.
Residents along Wilkes Street saw less traffic after the turn of the century. Southern Railway used the line as a spur to the warehouses along Union Street.
On St. Asaph Street, the rails no longer extended to Princess Street. Robert Portner used them, however, for his massive brewery that covered four blocks between Pendleton and Wythe. The rails ran along the Washington – Alexandria turnpike (future Powhatan Street) and then looped around to the Fayette Street tracks. Using the Virginia Midland Railway, Portner built an empire shipping his cold beer in refrigerated cards southward into North Carolina. He served on the Board of Directors for the Virginia Midland branch of Southern Railway. Portner’s Brewery went out of business in 1916, Prohibition delivering the knockout punch.
The Alexandria Marine Railway ended operations in 1923.
Chesapeake & Ohio
A new player emerged on the scene during this time, the Chesapeake & Ohio. Train Web points out:
In 1890, in order to be able to reach Washington, DC, the C&O Rwy. completed a 99-year trackage rights agreement with the Southern Railway for use of the line between Orange and Alexandria (AF Tower).
Map Three, 1951 (I used Historic Aerials, 1951 map)
With the arrival of automobiles and personal freedom, the Washington, Alexandria, Mount Vernon Electric line went the way of the horse and buggy. South of Great Hunting Creek, the 3,000-feet wooden trestle for the rail service was torn down, and replaced with landfill for that finger-shaped part of the GW Parkway. In and near Del Ray, the line was pulled up and the roadbed became Commonwealth Avenue. In Washington, the Federal Triangle construction swept away the line’s stations and tracks.
As noted earlier, the establishment of Potomac Yard had taken away the railroad activity along Fayette and Henry. It’s interesting to note, however, that tracks along Fayette (Montgomery northward) were still showing on the 1951 map. Also gone was the Asaph Street line, where the Alexandria and Washington RR had run.
Tracks were still on Wilkes Street, used a spur for Southern RR. The tunnel had been deepened after World War I to accommodate higher boxcars.
As noted by a historical marker at the tunnel,
The Wilkes Street track continued in operation until 1975 when declining industrial activity along the waterfront no longer warranted rail service. The tunnel is significant today as Alexandria’s only 19th century transportation site surviving intact.
The North Union street line continued to see activity with freight cars from the Norfolk Southern using the spur line to get to the Robinson Terminal North at the end of Oronoco Street.
Alexandria Brick Company spur to Union Street
The 1917 map shows a line running from Alexandria Brick Company to Union Street. Perhaps due to the passing in 1910 of Park Agnew, their owner, the company forfeited its chapter a few years later. I’m not sure what uses if any were made along this spur, so I have labeled it local use.
The 1951 map shows the end part gone and apartments built where Alfred Street meets Washington Street. The 1958 map shows all of this line gone, as well as on South Union. (Wilkes Street tracks still there). Hunting Towers are on the map. The northern most of these three propeller shaped buildings was torn down in 2002 for the new Wilson Bridge).
The Wilkes Street line saw some use as a spur to warehouses and manufacturers on Union Street until the 1970s. The trains were part of the Southern Railway system at that point. Three historical markers are located there. The tunnel is popular with cyclists seeking creative diversions.
The Union Street spur continued in use with freight cars to the Robinson Terminal North. Its deep-water operations, which began in the 1940s, ended recently and will pave the way for implementation of a waterfront hotel.
(It will be interesting to see what the road bed will be used for. The Alexandria Waterfront Plan includes the recommendation that some of the rail may be kept and incorporated in some way, as well as a freight car (Who doesn’t love an old train car???)
Map Four, 2015
By the 1980s, all of the original railroad tracks in the Old Town part of Alexandria were gone except the N. Union Street spur and the Southern RR tracks one block south of Duke. The rail structures in Potomac Yard were demolished in 1993, paving the way for the Potomac Yard Shopping Center and then the Potomac Yard redevelopment. Interpretive markers in the park and granite ones at Main Line Boulevard document some of the rail history.
Remnants of the Southern RR yard near Henry and Duke held on as late as the 1990s. It wasn’t until after 1994 that all the footprints were gone and Old Town Village was fully built. Remarkably, a satellite view even today reveals a hint of the curves of the rail lines at the southwest corner of Duke and Fayette (the Fannon building and its parking lot)
A fire in August 1971 had burned down the old roundhouse. The trashy site gave prospective developers fits. In the late 1980s, Gates Hudson & Associates proposed a mixed-use project that would have been named “Southern Plaza.”
Those plans fell through. The residential homes at Old Town Village rose up in the 1990s. The Rec Center’s eight-sided building at the corner of S. Fayette and Roundhouse Lane pays homage to the old roundhouse. For purist’s sake, it should be noted the old one was located one block to the east at Henry and Roundhouse (then Wolfe).
An historical marker for the Roundhouse is located at the Wilkes Street Tunnel
Orange & Alexandria Railroad Roundhouse formerly located near Duke and South Henry Streets. Engine named after Brigadier General Herman Haupt, Chief of Transportation, U.S. Military Railroads during the Civil War.
Matthew Brady photograph after 1863. Courtesy the of Library Congress.
The Wilkes Street line saw some use as a spur to warehouses and manufacturers on Union Street until the 1970s. The trains were part of the Southern Railway system at that point. Three historical markers are located there. The tunnel is popular with cyclists seeking creative diversions.
The Union Street spur continued in use with freight cars to the Robinson Terminal North. Its deep-water operations, which began in the 1940s, ended recently and will pave the way for implementation of a waterfront hotel.
(It will be interesting to see what the road bed will be used for. The Alexandria Waterfront Plan includes the recommendation that some of the rail may be kept and incorporated in some way, as well as a freight car (Who doesn’t love an old train car???)
Although thousands have crossed it, Hooff’s Run Bridge is somewhat of a lesser-known piece of history. It’s worth seeking out two historical markers that mention the rail days. One is located along the pathway between Duke Street and Jamieson Street, and about 450 feet north of the bridge.
Hooff’s Run Bridge.
The bridge is one of the last remnants of Alexandria’s first railroad, the Orange & Alexandria. The “O&ARR,” as it was commonly called, opened in 1851 and had 148 miles of track by 1860. The bridge was constructed in 1856 to span Hooff’s Run, the first waterway crossed by the railroad as it went from Alexandria’s Potomac River wharves to the roundhouse at Duke and Wolfe streets, and then west to Manassas Junction, Orange, Gordonsville, and finally to Lynchburg, Virginia. The O&ARR made Alexandria a regional commercial center in the mid-nineteenth century. During the Civil War (1861-1865), the railroad was seized by the U.S. Military Railroads and used to transport troops and supplies west and south. Thousands of wounded Union soldiers were also brought from the battlefields to the more than 30 U.S. military hospitals operating in Alexandria.
The Hooff family has had a continuing presence in Alexandria since the eighteenth century. Family members have been involved in farming, butchering, banking and real estate.
The railroad car used to take President Abraham Lincoln’s body to Illinois for burial, as seen with the W.H. Whiton engine, January 1865, was made at the U.S. Military Railroads yard east of the bridge. (National Archives)
The bridge consists of two round-arch sections: the northern, older portion, and the southern addition. The northern part dates to 1856 and replaced a wooden trestle (1851-1856) used when the Orange & Alexandria Railroad began operation. The 28-foot wide structure was constructed with a brick barrel vault, still observable under the bridge today, and faced with gray dry-laid sandstone. The Washington-Southern Railroad built a 16-foot wide addition, circa 1885-1895, to accommodate another track. By the early twentieth century, two more bridges stood to the north with additional tracks; they both were dismantled around 1948.
The Hooff’s Run Bridge is the only existing stone structure associated with the Orange & Alexandria Railroad in the Commonwealth of Virginia. It is the oldest surviving bridge in Alexandria, and with the Wilkes Street Tunnel, one of two preserved structures associate with the town’s first railroad.
Alexandria Heritage Trail
Another marker is located under the Gazebo at the corner of Holland Lane and Jamieson Avenue, and is part of the Alexandria African American Heritage Park.
The land for this memorial is of special significance. In 1885 this parcel of land was purchased by the Black Baptist Cemetery Association and a number of grave sites remain here. Hooff’s Run, which runs through this site provided access to the Potomac River and the town of Alexandria for a variety of traders and retailers. By the middle of the 19th Century, railroads provided a new transportation system. Established about 1851, the first railroad in this vicinity was the Orange and Alexandria which passed through this land on its way form the town center to more western ports of Virginia.
The Norfolk Southern Corporation has set aside this land as a memorial to recognize, celebrate and commemorate African American contributions to the Alexandria community. The Alexandria African American Heritage Park, a gift to the city from the Norfolk Southern Corporation, will contribute to the rich cultural heritage of Alexandria. The history and accomplishments of African American leaders will stimulate young people to develop esteem, hope, determination and pride in themselves. The memorial park coexists with the original landscape of the cemetery and preserves the interesting and varied plant life on this site. The design creates as atmosphere suitable for nature walks or meditation.
The Ad Hoc Committee on a memorial to honor black leaders. Alexandria Society for the Preservation of Black Heritage, Inc.
In the 1980s, rail activity along the western edge of Old Town saw a new form of transportation, with Metro service opening up with stations at Braddock Road, King Street, and Eisenhower Avenue (A new station at Potomac Yard is scheduled to open in 2018).
Conclusion
If someone is looking for a piece of Alexandria’s history to explore for a book, the railroads would be yours for the taking. We’d ask you not forget the Alexandria Passenger Railway, a line that ran from the foot of King to Peyton Street, and then to Hooff’s Run. Lasting just one year (1873), its history has gotten lost in the shuffle of all the other railroads.
It should be noted the line used horse-drawn carriages. Not exactly dodger material, but we’ll count it as our ride reaches the end of the line.
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