Former West Virginia Governor William A. MacCorkle once described William Nelson Page as a man who knew "the land as a farmer knows his fields." That intimacy with the mountains and coal seams of southern West Virginia was Page's essential gift — not the financial genius of his partner Henry Rogers, not the corporate power of the men who ran the N&W and C&O, but the patient, detailed, place-based knowledge of an engineer who had walked these ridges for decades and understood both what was there and what was possible. The Virginian Railway, with its precisely surveyed routes, its moderate grades, and its capacity for enormous coal trains, was the physical expression of that knowledge.
Page was born in Virginia in 1854 and educated as a civil engineer at the University of Virginia. He came to West Virginia in the 1870s to help build the double-track Chesapeake and Ohio Railway through the New and Kanawha River valleys — one of the most demanding construction projects in Appalachian railroad history up to that point. What he found in those mountains, beyond the engineering challenges, was coal. The seams he observed during C&O construction would occupy his professional imagination for the rest of his life.
Page settled in Ansted, a small community in Fayette County, and became deeply involved in coal and related enterprises. He developed and managed mining operations in the New River area; the town of Page, West Virginia, was eventually named in his honor. As a coal operator, he experienced firsthand the frustration that drove many independent mine owners to anger: the Chesapeake and Ohio and the Norfolk and Western, which controlled most of the existing rail corridors in southern West Virginia, charged freight rates that Page and others considered exploitative. When operators tried to negotiate fair interchange agreements, they were rebuffed. The big railroads had no incentive to reduce their leverage over captive shippers.
Page's response was to build his own railroad. He began modestly. In 1896, he developed the Loup Creek and Deepwater Railway, a logging railroad connecting a sawmill on the old Loup Creek Estate to the C&O main line at Deepwater on the Kanawha River. In 1898 he rechartered it as the Deepwater Railway, with the more ambitious goal of connecting to nearby coal mines. As the Deepwater grew, however, Page discovered that the big railroads had no intention of offering fair interchange rates that would make his short line commercially viable. Rather than abandon the project, he expanded it.
Around 1902, Page enlisted the financial backing of Henry Huttleston Rogers, a principal of Standard Oil and one of the wealthiest men in the United States. The two men agreed on a plan: build not just to the nearest junction with the big railroads, but all the way to tidewater — an independent, complete route from the West Virginia coalfields to a new coal pier on Hampton Roads. Rogers would provide the money, quietly and secretly, while Page provided the engineering vision and the knowledge of the terrain.
Page pushed the Deepwater Railway southward through Wyoming and Mercer counties, its right-of-way secured through Princeton and toward the Virginia state line. In Virginia, he and Rogers quietly incorporated the Tidewater Railway and secured rights-of-way across the southern tier of the state, bypassing major cities where established railroads had political influence. The operation required years of careful, secret work. At 26 Broadway in New York City in 1906, N&W president Lucius E. Johnson was finally brought to a meeting with Rogers and learned for the first time who was financing Page's railroads. N&W corporate records note only that the meeting was brief. The rights-of-way were already secured, and there was nothing Johnson could do.
On March 8, 1907, the Deepwater and Tidewater railways were combined and renamed the Virginian Railway Company, incorporated in Virginia. On April 15, 1907, William Nelson Page became the first president of the new railroad. His elevation to the presidency of a line he had spent nearly a decade scheming, engineering, and fighting to build was a moment of professional vindication matched by few entrepreneurs in American railroad history. He had started with a logging short line and ended with a Class I railroad running 443 miles from the mountains of West Virginia to Hampton Roads.
As president, Page oversaw the completion of construction and the Virginian's entry into full operation. The last spike was driven on January 29, 1909, at the New River Bridge at Glen Lyn, Virginia — the point where the West Virginia Deepwater and the Virginia Tidewater sections were physically joined. Page's engineering instincts had guided the route selection from the beginning: low grades, strong structures, careful earthwork, built to a standard that the older mountain railroads had not achieved because they lacked both the capital and the construction techniques available in 1907.
Page stepped back from active management after the VGN's first years, though he remained connected to the railroad as a director and shareholder. He died in 1932, having lived to see the Virginian become precisely what he had envisioned: a modern, profitable, well-engineered railroad that had broken the big railroads' monopoly on southern West Virginia coal traffic and earned the nickname the "Richest Little Railroad in the World." The railroad outlasted him by twenty-seven years before merging into the N&W — and the main line he built still carries freight under Norfolk Southern today.