The word "abandoned" carries a specific legal meaning in American railroad law that differs importantly from its everyday sense, and that distinction matters for anyone trying to understand the current status of former rail corridors in Mercer County. In railroad law, abandonment is a formal process requiring Surface Transportation Board approval—a step that, once taken, is difficult to reverse, because it can trigger the reverter clauses in many land grants and result in the corridor fragmenting into separate private parcels as adjacent landowners reclaim their portions. A railroad that stops using a line but does not formally abandon it retains ownership and, at least in theory, retains the option of returning to service. The result is a legal category that does not exist in common language: a corridor that is completely out of service, overgrown, and physically unusable—but which is not abandoned in the legal sense and remains on the railroad's books as owned property.
Norfolk Southern's handling of the former N&W Bluestone Branch in Mercer County is the clearest local example of this situation. The branch has seen no revenue freight traffic since 1984, and through most of its length the tracks have not been maintained in any operational sense: vegetation encroaches on the right-of-way, bridge timbers deteriorate, and in some sections the alignment has been partially obscured by decades of natural growth. Yet Norfolk Southern has never filed a formal abandonment application with the Surface Transportation Board. The right-of-way remains NS's legal property, and in the section closest to the junction at Bluestone—approximately two kilometers of former main branch—portions of the original rails remain in place and are actively used by NS for the storage of freight cars. The corridor is simultaneously a functioning storage facility in that short section and a legally in-limbo transportation relic through the rest of its length.
The practical consequences of this legal status are several. The corridor cannot be converted to a trail or developed for other public purposes without NS's consent. Adjacent landowners cannot reclaim the right-of-way as they might if formal abandonment had occurred. Rails that remain in place in some sections are NS property that cannot be removed by local governments or private parties. And the historical and environmental character of the corridor—which passes through the scenic Bluestone River valley and through the historic communities of Bramwell and Montcalm—is preserved by default in a kind of institutional stasis that may eventually resolve into either trail conversion, some form of rail reactivation, or simple continued dormancy depending on decisions made in NS's real estate and operations offices.
The former tertiary branches of the Bluestone system present a different picture. The bridges carrying those branches over the Bluestone River and its tributaries were dismantled after the 1984 final freight run, physically severing the connections between the branches and the main line. Without their bridge crossings, the branch grades serve no operational purpose and have effectively merged back into the landscape. The earthworks remain—embankments, cuts, and the characteristic level grade along creek banks that construction crews built in the 1890s and 1900s—but the rails have been removed and the infrastructure recovered for scrap value. Researcher Andrew Turnbull's photographic documentation of these former alignments, published on the Roads and Rails of Mercer County website and dated primarily to 2013 field surveys, shows the current state of many former branch grades: overgrown, quiet, and still physically legible to anyone who knows how to read a former railroad alignment in mountain terrain.
The former Virginian Railway yard and shop complex in Princeton occupies a different position in this landscape of former rail facilities. The Virginian Railway Princeton Yard Historic District was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2003, recognizing the historical significance of the 33-acre complex and the buildings that survive from the railroad's construction and expansion campaigns of the 1900s through 1920s. The district includes structures such as the Locomotive Erecting Shop, the Car Wheel Shop, and associated pump houses, all in the vernacular Romanesque Revival industrial style characteristic of the Virginian's early construction period. These buildings represent a physical continuity with the railroad era that the rural rights-of-way cannot offer—actual standing structures, not merely earthwork traces—and they are the most intact surviving evidence of the Virginian's operational presence in Mercer County. The Princeton Railroad Museum occupies a central position within this former railroad district, preserving and interpreting the history of the line on the very ground where the Virginian once assembled and maintained its equipment.
The Surface Transportation Board maintains a Railroad Map Depot on its website that allows researchers to identify the current status of railroad corridors, including whether corridors have been formally abandoned or remain on a carrier's active or inactive property records. Crowd-sourced mapping projects and the Abandoned and Out-of-Service Railroad Lines map maintained by the Forsaken Rails project provide additional visual context, showing in geographic terms where former Mercer County alignments ran and what has happened to each segment. West Virginia law provides an additional layer of protection for public corridor access: state code establishes that abandoned railroad corridors acquired by state or local government cannot be used in ways that would unreasonably limit a possible return to rail service in the future, a provision intended to preserve transportation options for a state that has historically depended on rail for the movement of both freight and people.
For the historically minded visitor, former railroad grades in Mercer County are readable from public roads and public land in numerous locations. The former Bluestone Branch grade is visible alongside West Virginia Route 20 in several sections between Bramwell and Montcalm; former tertiary branch grades appear as characteristic level lines along tributary creek beds seen from county roads; and the cleared straight corridors of the former Virginian and N&W parallel lines can often be traced through the valleys where both railroads once operated. A former N&W cast-iron bridge sign—reading "Do Not Walk nor Trespass on the Bridge"—survived at Rock as of 2013 field documentation by Turnbull, though its continued presence cannot be guaranteed. These traces in the landscape are, in their own way, as authentic a historical record as any document in an archive: the physical persistence of a hundred years of railroad investment in the mountains of southern West Virginia.