Railpace Magazine had an article on this back in April 2012. This past weekend I had an opportunity to visit a friend in Roanoke VA and we took a little ride. With the his help and a little help from MapQuest, we found the CP Arthur up a gravel road off of 11/460.
Does anybody know the origin of the name Arthur for this control point? The nearest town is Shawsville.
Just curious for obvious reasons.
Thanks,
AF
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Probably named for a N&W or NS employee. Here's a map of all the MPs and CPs, etc. in the Christiansburg Division (I used to live in Blacksburg, and enjoyed a lot of railfanning in that area).
https://maps.google.com/maps/m...pn=0.542111,1.352692
You'll need to zoom in on the map to space out all the pins.
Don't know where the name came from, but at one pre-merger time there was a long middle track there with a set of crossovers in the middle of it. The west end was not too far from the east portals of the Montgomery twin tunnels. It was the only middle track on Alleghany Mountain between Elliston and the middle track at Christiansburg. At one time there was a tower at Arthur; control was later moved to the dispatcher's office in Roanoke.
EdKing
I lobbied them to call it CP Bill but did they listen to me?
I lobbied them to call it CP Bill but did they listen to me?
They could have called it CP Ed and saved a couple of letters on the sign.
EdKing
Come on guys.....they would've named it after who ever threw the most money at them...LOL! Kind of like Illinois politics!
Back when that location was named, they were building the railroad, and the folks who were throwing money were throwing REAL money, without which the thing couldn't have been built. This was the original Lynchburg to Bristol "Virginia and Tennessee" railroad, a quarter of a century before it went down the New River to become a coal road. As it happened, the V&T merged with two other roads to make the Atlantic, Mississippi and Ohio, which went bankrupt mainly due to post-Civil War business conditions. Even after it became a coal road reorganized as the Norfolk and Western RailROAD it went into bankruptcy again, due to the cost of a westward expansion into Ohio which would later prove immensely profitable. So those original moneythrowers didn't come out too well . . .
EdKing
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