ABOVE: On September 22, 2012, Norfolk Southern train U86 grinds upgrade across the trestle at Covel, W.Va., led by EMD SD70ACe demonstrator No. 2012 with a utility train in tow en route to the Belews Creek Steam Station near Winston-Salem, N.C. RIGHT: Train No. 811 roars upgrade through the deep rock cut at Oney Gap with a visiting Canadian Pacific ES44AC leading the way on December 18, 2014. The train is down to a crawl as the locomotives slip on the snow and ice-slickened rail while ascending the 1.5 percent grade.


up the mountain, and send the power back to Elmore for a second cut. Both cuts would then be doubled together at Clark’s Gap to make a large drag for the run to Roanoke. The process, called “hill runs,” was derived from Virginian days, but Norfolk Southern still utilized this method until the line’s demise. Even with today’s high-horsepower diesels, a modern hill run had to have at least five or six locomotives on the train to make the grade. After several strikes in the early


1920s brought on by employees complaining of the “hellish conditions” of nearly suffocating through the five tunnels climbing Clark’s Gap mountain, The Virginian electrified the 134 miles between Mullens, W.Va., and Roanoke, Va., between 1925 and 1926. Despite


50 JANUARY 2016 • RAILFAN.COM


the high initial investment, this move cut the railroad’s annual operating costs almost in half. The entire P-D was included in this project. The Virginian soon thereafter purchased a fleet of Alco-Westinghouse EL-3A “Squarehead” electric locomotives to power its trains. Steam-powered hill runs would crawl up the mountain at a little better than 7 m.p.h., while the electrics could haul at double that speed. The Virginian later acquired EL-2B


electrics in 1948 from General Electric, which were the world’s most powerful locomotives at the time. A set of them could produce over 6,800 hp and 275,000 pounds of tractive effort. In the diesel era, Virginian acquired


a fleet of beefy H24-66 Trainmasters manufactured by Fairbanks-Morse. The blue-and-yellow paint applied to those locomotives is probably the most well- known and eye-catching scheme the Virginian had. Norfolk Southern carried


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