Virginia Blue Ridge and Southern Railway

In the future I will begin to share with you photos of my current HO scale model railroad. This layout is based on a published trackplan and is designed for a first time layout builder with limited space, in other words, me.  I was inspired to develop the VBR&S by Jim Six's Carolina & Northwestern.  Jim's former layout (he moved and it was dismantled before being finished), was a fictional bridge route mostly in the Carolinas that took into account his interest in the ACL and Clinchfield.   I came up with the VBR&S to take a favorite shortline of mine, the Atlantic & Yadkin Railway, and imagine that the hoped for connection with the Norfolk & Western Railway north of Mount Airy would give the line that bridge route to the Ohio Valley.  The real A&Y was the product of the Cape Fear & Yadkin Valley Railway's failure to fulfill it's promoters' dreams.  My idea was to realize that dream and turn the sleepy little shortline with it's two trains per day into a much more vibrant railroad with multiple trains and maybe even some passenger action!  But I found that a fictional road and a small oval trackplan was great for learning how to build a layout, but was not as much fun as trying to recreate a real historical railroad.  This became more and more true as I became more and more engrossed in the history of the CF&YV and A&Y!

Right now I will share the short-lived VBR&S's hopeful history.  Like the real A&Y though, the grandiose plans of the VBR&S's owner and operator, never came to full bloom.  I hope you enjoy reading about the VRB&S as much as I enjoyed the planning and construction (it has made it to a semi-scenicked operating layout)!  I hope you might find something of value in this modelers experience and ideas to date.

A short mythic history:  The Virginia Blue Ridge and Southern Railway is a small short line railroad linking Radford, Virginia and Wilmington, North Carolina. The VBR&S consists of two divisions, the Blue Ridge and the Yadkin Valley divisions.  Prior to the American Civil War, the founders of the VBR&S' predecessors wanted to link the bountiful Shenandoah Valley with the ports in North Carolina.  Although the idea had merit, the Blue Ridge mountains and the Civil War blocked construction.  Surveys of a route and the creation of a Virginia, Wilmington and North Carolina Southern Rail Road Company chartered in both states was all that happened.  After the war, the need for farm product exports was less until rebuilding the South was complete.  In the meantime, the Cape Fear and Yadkin Valley Railroad was formed entirely in the state of North Carolina.  This line went into bankruptcy and was reorganized into the Atlantic and Yadkin Railroad.  This line was owned half by the Atlantic and Danville and half by the Wilmington and Weldon. When the A&D went belly up and was reorganized by J.P. Morgan interests into the Southern Railway, the W&W now owned by the Atlantic Coast Line Railway (and a stronger competitor to the Southern than the W&W was with the A&D) offered to buy the Atlantic and Yadkin RR outright.  The Morgan interests would not allow this.  Instead, they negotiated with a "neutral" third party, a David K. Clyde, to buy the entire Atlantic and Yadkin Railroad and set it up as an independent line.  The heads of the Southern and ACL assumed that this little shortline would soon succumb to the competition of their own railroads and thus be an easy acquisition in a few years.  J.P. Morgan relied upon the familial ties of David K. and the former owners of the A&D system, William P. Clyde, to strengthen the Southern's bargaining position.  The ACL figured that the embittered Clyde family of Philadelphia, who lost a fortune in railroads but managed to hang on to their shipping lines in the Chesapeake and north, would never sell to the Southern ensuring a bright future for the ACL in North Carolina.  Both were wrong!  David K. Clyde knew of coal in the Blue Ridge region of Virginia and planned on extending the line across the VA/NC border to haul it down to Wilmington!  If only he'd have known about the Pocahontas fields!  As it was, David K. Clyde managed to get the Atlantic and Yadkin into Radford and a connection with the Norfolk and Western gaining a small portion of the Appalachian coal business and creating a bridge route for goods from Ohio.  Unfortunately for Mr. Clyde Wilmington did not end up as great a natural port on the Atlantic as Norfolk.  Although the Atlantic and Yadkin stayed solvent, it was a poor cousin to other roads.  In 1910, Clyde sold the Atlantic and Yadkin to the Southern Railway.  As plans to abandon portions of the line began to be discussed by SR executives, WWI and the nationalization of the railroads changed everything.  The Atlantic and Yadkin was separated from the Southern and returned to independent status.  At the war's end, the road was bought by the Bird family who saw the lumber potential of the A&Y land holdings as well as the rising demand for coal in the developing industries of North Carolina.  The A&Y was renamed upon purchase to the Virginia Blue Ridge and Southern Railway upon the insistence of Virginia Bird, who had discovered a letter from one of the founders of the original company dated 1858 in her perusal of the Company books.  The Virginia Blue Ridge and Southern Railway was again absorbed into the Southern Railway in 1949 and is known now only by the VBRS sublettering seen on the first generation diesels that plied it's rails.

This site © Copyrighted  1999 by David M. Bott.

This page last edited Monday, August 16, 1999