Railroad history tends to focus on the major lines—the mainlines on national maps, the famous tunnels and bridges. But the economic geography of a region like Mercer County cannot be understood through main and branch lines alone. The true map of the Pocahontas coalfield is written in the spur lines: short, lightly built tracks that reached from the branch railroads into every productive hollow, connecting individual mines to the transportation network and creating, almost incidentally, the communities that grew up around those connections. This survey covers the principal spur lines and tertiary branches of the Norfolk & Western's Bluestone Branch system in western Mercer County, following the structure documented by researcher Andrew Turnbull on his Roads and Rails of Mercer County website and cross-referenced against USGS historical quadrangle maps and the mine map archives of the West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey.
The Bluestone Branch itself—running from the junction at Coopers through Bramwell, Duhring, Montcalm, Rock, and Matoaka—was the trunk of a system that Turnbull aptly describes as resembling "spokes on a wheel." From the trunk, subsidiary branches reached northward, westward, and into the upper creek valleys of the drainage system. These tertiary branches were built as common-carrier freight lines; their passenger service was limited, and their primary purpose was always the loading and movement of coal. Beyond the tertiary branches, individual mine spurs—some only a few hundred yards long—reached directly to mine entries and tipples. The full system, at its mid-twentieth-century peak, covered virtually every mine-bearing hollow in western Mercer County with at least a thread of standard-gauge N&W track.
At Simmons—absorbed into Bramwell's town limits by 1909 but retained as a distinct railroad stop—a tertiary branch split northward alongside what is now U.S. Route 52, serving mining operations in the Simmons Creek valley. The bridge carrying this branch over the Bluestone River at Simmons was dismantled after the branch system's final freight run in 1984, removing the last physical evidence of its northern reach from the landscape. The Simmons Creek Branch served coal operators who benefited from its connection to both the Bluestone Branch and, via the nearby interchange at Matoaka, to the Virginian Railway's competing rate structure.
From Duhring and the adjacent community of Flipping, the original branch alignment had initially turned west up Flipping Creek before the main branch was extended northeast by 1901. Even after that realignment, the Flipping Creek track continued as an active tertiary branch, running approximately three kilometers upstream to the community of Goodwill. There, the Louisville Coal & Coke Company and Winding Gulf Collieries maintained operations through the first half of the twentieth century. Mining ceased in Goodwill in 1958, after which the coal camp infrastructure was dismantled and the community effectively reverted to woodland. According to Turnbull's field documentation, portions of the former railroad grade are accessible to all-terrain vehicles, but nothing of the industrial infrastructure remains standing at the site.
The Crane Creek Branch, diverging northwestward from Montcalm, was the most extensive of the Bluestone Branch's tertiary lines. It ran approximately nine kilometers from Montcalm through the communities of Godfrey, Crystal, and McComas before the alignment split near McComas into eastern and western forks serving the sub-community of Mannering. Godfrey was established and named by the Godfrey Coal Company; Crystal by the Crystal Coal & Coke Company—the practice of company self-naming was nearly universal in the Appalachian coalfields, and a community's name often functioned as a direct corporate identifier for researchers working with the historical record. Both Godfrey and Crystal saw coal production cease by mid-century, leaving today only a handful of residential structures and ruins to mark their former locations.
McComas, at the Crane Creek Branch's far terminus, occupied a scale entirely different from the other communities on this system. Historical maps and aerial images from the 1920s show a radial web of tipples, conveyors, multi-track classification yards, administrative buildings, and hundreds of residential structures packed along the creek valleys—what Turnbull describes as possibly the largest coal camp in West Virginia by some accounts. The American Coal Company was the dominant operator, with Thomas Coal and Pocahontas Fuel also present, giving McComas an unusual concentration of competing corporate interests within a single camp geography. The Crane Creek Branch remained in service at McComas longer than on most of the Bluestone system's other tertiary lines, persisting until the final 1984 closure.
The Righthand Fork Branch diverged north from the Giatto junction adjacent to Matoaka, serving the communities of Smokeless and Hiawatha before connecting to the Big Branch Spur that reached northward to the community eventually known as Piedmont. Piedmont's naming history is itself a minor illustration of the confusion that accumulated in the coalfield name-scape: the site was originally called Sylvia, then redesignated Widemouth by postal authorities, and then renamed Piedmont by the 1950s—at which point it conflicted with an established, larger town of the same name in the West Virginia eastern panhandle. Hiawatha, at the northern extent of intact trackage on the Righthand Fork Branch, was served at various times by Ennis Coal, Smokeless Coal & Coke, and Weyanoke Coal & Coke—three distinct operators competing in the same tight hollow, a level of corporate density that reflected both the seam's productivity and the relatively open market conditions of the early coal era.
The Lefthand Fork Branch ran approximately six kilometers westward from the Giatto junction, paralleling the Virginian Railway's main line into the community of Lamar, originally named Algonquin until sometime in the 1930s. A 1946 Department of the Interior photograph by documentarian Russell Lee shows an N&W hopper car clearly visible at the Lamar camp, with the parallel Virginian track barely concealed by the immediate hillside—a rare image of both railroads in the same frame at this far western point in the N&W's Mercer County reach. Mining at Lamar ceased in the 1950s, and by 1967 most of the buildings had been removed. The Lefthand Fork Branch represented the western limit of the N&W's operational reach in Mercer County; the Virginian continued through Clarks Gap to points beyond the county line, but the N&W's freight territory ended at Lamar.
The primary cartographic source for the Bluestone Branch spur system in its early configuration is the 1886 map of the Flat Top coalfield drawn by Jedediah Hotchkiss, held by the Library of Congress under catalog item 2005625145. Hotchkiss—a cartographer of considerable reputation who had served as Stonewall Jackson's mapmaker during the Civil War—surveyed the Pocahontas and Bluestone collieries network in the formative years of the coalfield's development, and his map shows the rail connections serving the major collieries with a precision that makes it an indispensable primary source. Researchers seeking more detailed mine-level documentation are directed to the West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey's Mine Information Database System, which provides scanned mine maps showing individual spur alignments, mine entries, and tipple locations for most of the operations recorded under state regulatory requirements following 1969.
The physical remnants of these spur lines remain more visible in the landscape than casual observation suggests. The characteristic mark of a former railroad grade—an unusually flat, consistently wide path along a creek bank, slightly elevated above the adjacent bottomland—persists for decades after the rails are removed, particularly in the mountain terrain of western Mercer County where natural erosion rates preserve earthwork indefinitely. Bridges removed in 1984 left concrete abutments and pier foundations in the creek beds; embankments built through low-lying areas remain as linear ridges; and the cuts driven through hillsides to maintain consistent grades remain as notches in the ridge profiles, visible from county roads that parallel many of the former branch alignments. For anyone who knows what to look for, western Mercer County's hollows are still legible as a former railroad landscape—a dense, interconnected system of extraction infrastructure that left its mark on the land long after the last loaded coal car made its way east.