ABOVE: The bright orange of Mountain Top Inc.’s Spring Loadout at Tacoma, Va., is a local landmark. There are loads to be pulled from Spring as a westbound empty hopper train passes through on its way to Norton on July 21, 2007. RIGHT: A former Conrail unit and a rebuilt caboose add splashes of color to the scene at the Norton, Va., engine terminal on February 1, 2009.
made at Norton (previously known as Prince’s Flats) in the spring of 1891. The west end of the completed Clinch Valley line was a twisting, turning, skewed affair marked by numerous S- curves. One construction worker, S.M. Holbrook, was accused of single hand- edly being responsible for the Clinch Valley being so crooked, a charge he flatly denied.
Modern Operations
With construction completed, the two railroads got down to the business of regular operations. The route via Nor- ton became an important gateway for traffic moving from the Midwest to Tidewater. While coal dominated, with the line being used as a bridge route, merchandise (non-coal) traffic was a significant part of the traffic mix for many years.
From 1973 to 1986, the Louisville & Nashville (after 1982, Seaboard Sys- tem) had trackage rights over the
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Clinch Valley District between Norton and St. Paul, Va. Loaded coal trains from the L&N’s yard at Loyall, Ky., used the N&W Clinch Valley main to reach its corporate cousin Clinchfield Railroad.
With the close-clearance tunnels on the Clinch Valley, coupled with changes in the Hours of Service law re- sulting in a more segmented operation, the non-coal traffic quickly found other
routings. The trackage rights over the Clinch Valley ended after the construc- tion of a large bridge at Big Stone Gap, Va., linking the ex-L&N Cumberland Valley Subdivision with the Southern Railway Appalachia District in 1986. Subsequently, the Appalachia to Nor- ton segment of the L&N’s Cumberland Valley Subdivision was abandoned. The Appalachia-Kelleyview section lat- er came back to life under Norfolk
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