The Peninsula Extension which created the Peninsula Subdivision of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway (C&O) was the new railroad line on the Virginia Peninsula from Richmond to southeastern Warwick County. Its principal purpose was to provide an important new pathway for coal mined in West Virginia to reach the harbor of Hampton Roads for coastal and export shipping on collier ships.
Completed on 16 October 1881, the new double-tracked railroad and the other development visions of industrialist Collis Potter Huntington resulted in a 15-year transition of the rural farm village of Newport News into a new independent city which also became home to the world's largest shipyard. The railroad, one of the later developed in Virginia, became important to many communities, opening transportation options, and stimulating commerce and military operations on the Peninsula throughout the 20th century.
Over 125 years after it opened, many of the stations are gone. Spur lines have both come and gone. Also gone are the steam locomotives, save one on display at Huntington Park in Newport News, another at the Science Museum of Virginia in Richmond, and a third which was left buried in Richmond's Church Hill Tunnel.
Despite the changes, in the early 21st century, the rails of the Peninsula Subdivision continue to form an important link for Amtrak service from Williamsburg and Newport News. High quality bituminous coal was the motivation for originally building the line, and current owner CSX Transportation continues day and night to deliver massive amounts of it to be loaded onto ships destined for points worldwide.
Chesapeake and Ohio Railway
Opening at the outset of the final quarter of the 19th century, the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway (C&O) was the fulfillment of a long-held goal of Virginians.
Many years before the American Revolution, George Washington, a Virginian licensed as a surveyor by the College of William and Mary during the colonial era, identified the importance of a transportation link between the navigable waters flowing to the Atlantic Ocean and those across the Eastern Continental Divide in the Allegheny Mountains which lead to the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico. He had mapped out several potential routes, and in 1785, he been an early investor in a canal venture.
The James River was navigable east from the Fall Line at Richmond and Manchester to Hampton Roads, the Chesapeake Bay, and the Atlantic Ocean. However, from these sister cities at the head of navigation, of rapids marked the transition to the Piedmont Region, and only very shallow craft such as bateau boats could navigate portions of the river from that point west. Over from Richmond, across the Blue Ridge Mountains, the Shenandoah Valley, and what was called the "Transmountaine" region in old Virginia, better known in modern times as the Alleghany Mountains, were the falls of the Kanawha River. They similarly marked the head of navigation, but from the west. From the falls of the Kanawha, ships could follow the river to its confluence with the Ohio River, which in turn, flowed west to the Mississippi River. In the earlier periods during which a transportation link was contemplated, the Colony of Virginia (according to the British and its own calculations) extended all the way to the west to what is now Cairo, Illinois, where the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers join. Of course, transportation was not the only obstacle to developing these western regions, as both the French and the Indians did not see it the same way.
In any event, that gap in the navigable waters became a major focus for Virginians. By the end of the 18th century, efforts to link these heads of navigation were underway with the building of turnpikes and canals. Work on the James River and Kanawha Turnpike and the James River and Kanawha Canal, both prominent infrastructure improvements, was partially funded by the Virginia General Assembly through the Virginia Board of Public Works, although the canal was never completed. By the 1830s, railroads were emerging as a favorable technology for such purposes, and Virginia's network of turnpikes, canals, and railroads grew, substantially guided by the civil engineering skills of Claudius Crozet. Both railroads and canals had conquered the Blue Ridge Mountains and entered the Shenandoah Valley region when the American Civil War broke out in 1861, bringing new work to a virtual halt. By the end of the War in 1865, many of Virginia's railroads, turnpikes, and canals lay in ruins, although the related debt which had helped fund building them was still outstanding.
After the War, part of Virginia had been subdivided to form the new state of West Virginia. Both states were heavily in debt, but wanted to encourage completion of a rail link to the Ohio River, which they saw as vital to rebuilding and expanding commerce. To do without government funding, the state legislatures of both Virginia and West Virginia tried to attract investors several times in 1866 and 1867. Finally, under a plan offered by the Virginia General Assembly, in 1868, the new project was merged with the extant Virginia Central Railroad, connected Richmond with the westernmost point at the time. The new enterprise was to be known as the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway (C&O).
The head of the Virginia Central Railroad was former Confederate General Williams Carter Wickham of Hanover County, Virginia. He was a descendant of several former Virginia governors and the grandson of constitutional lawyer John Wickham, who had set up shop in Richmond after the American Revolutionary War and served as a respected agent of financial interests in England and Scotland. However, in the volatile period of the late 1860s, General Wickham failed in his efforts to secure either southern or British financing as had been hoped. Finally, he journeyed to New York City, where he successfully attracted the interest of industrialist Collis P. Huntington and gained access to the new financing needed. Huntington had been one of the "Big Four", the men involved in building the Central Pacific portion of the Transcontinental Railroad, which was at that time just reaching completion.
Under the new leadership and financing, during 1869–1873 the hard work of building through West Virginia was done with large crews working from both ends, much in the manner the Union Pacific Railroad and the Central Pacific Railroad had been built to complete their transcontinental rails.
The final spike ceremony for the long line from Richmond to the Ohio River was held on 29 January 1873 at Hawks Nest railroad bridge in New River Gorge, near the town of Ansted, West Virginia.
Huntington's vision for the Peninsula Virginia's long dream for the C&O had been trade with the west, and Huntington's work accomplished that by 1873. However, he and others also realized that the new railroads for the first time offered a practical way to ship coal. The region's high quality bituminous coal had been known to be among West Virginia's vast natural resources, but until now, there had been no way to transport it to markets. The new C&O railroad provided a method of transporting this valuable product out of the mountains and east to Richmond, where ocean-going shipping called. However, one problem they faced was that depth of the channels of the tidal portion of the river to reach Richmond was insufficient to accommodate the draft required by the large colliers.
As a young man in 1837, Collis P. Huntington had visited the rural village known as Newport News Point in Warwick County at the mouth of the James River on the harbor of Hampton Roads. It later became clear that Huntington had never forgotten his 1837 visit to Newport News Point. By the early 1870s, he and his associates began buying up land on the Peninsula, nowhere more intensely than in Warwick County, where their Old Dominion Land Company soon owned enough for a railroad line, a coal pier and even more. In 1873, Major Robert H. Temple surveyed a railway line from Richmond to the mouth of the James River.
Building the Peninsula Extension To extend the line east to Hampton Roads from the end of the former Virginia Central Railroad at Richmond in the Shockhoe Valley, there was only a single major obstacle: Richmond's Church Hill, occupied by some of the city's older and nicer buildings. From there east, the only significant obstacles across the gentle coastal plains a distance of about were several rivers and some wetlands down the Peninsula to reach Newport News.
The initial solution to overcoming that major obstacle in Richmond was the Church Hill Tunnel. The tracks to the new tunnel left the old Virginia Central line west of 17th street and curved southeasterly to enter the tunnel east of N. 18th Street and north of E. Marshall Street under Cedar Street. The east end of the long tunnel appeared just north of today's Williamsburg Road near 31st Street below Libby Terrace Park.
The construction of the Church Hill Tunnel was problematic. Unlike the bedrock through which the C&O carved its western tunnels, in Richmond, the blue marl clay shrink-swell soil tended to change with rainfall and groundwater. There were cave-ins during the construction. Ten workers were reportedly killed. The tunnel was completed and opened in 1875. East of the tunnel, the C&O established its Fulton Yard, with a capacity of thousands of rail cars, a roundhouse to service the steam locomotives, and other support facilities. Planning and right-of-way acquisition for the Peninsula Extension took another 5 years.
From Fulton Yard, after climbing out of the James River Valley, the surveyors generally followed the high ground of the Peninsula between the rivers which border it. As a result, the route selected faced only gentle grades through coastal plains of the Tidewater region of Virginia, dropping only about in elevation, from Richmond (54 feet above sea-level) to Newport News (at above sea-level). The new C&O line ran through several American Civil War battlefield areas in eastern Henrico County and then through Charles City County, New Kent County, James City County, York County and Warwick County. It crossed the Chickahominy River south of Bottoms Bridge, Diascund Creek south of Lanexa, and the Warwick River east of Lee Hall.
Construction on the tracks between Richmond and Newport News began in Newport News in December 1880. In a method used before by Huntington, work also began from Richmond the following February, and crews at each end worked toward each other. The crews met and completed the line west of Williamsburg on 16 October 1881 although temporary tracks had been installed in some areas to speed completion. This was just in the nick of time because Huntington and his associates had promised they would provide rail service to Yorktown, where the United States was celebrating the centennial of the surrender of the British troops under Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown in 1781. (That event was considered most symbolic of the end of the conflict, which was later formalized by the Treaty of Paris in 1783). Only 3 days after the last spike ceremony, on 19 October, the first passenger train from Newport News took local residents and national officials to the Cornwallis Surrender Centennial Celebration at Yorktown on temporary tracks which were laid from the main line at the new Lee Hall Depot to Yorktown, and then removed afterward.
New railroad line's impact on the Peninsula