The Virginian Railway existed because of coal. Henry Huttleston Rogers financed a scientifically graded line from the West Virginia coalfields to the tidewater at Norfolk so that loaded coal trains could roll almost the whole way downhill to the sea — the most efficient coal road ever built.
Behind every one of those coal trains were the miners of the Pocahontas field and the towns that grew up around the mines. Their work fed the furnaces, the ships and the power plants of a growing nation, and it filled the hoppers that made the "richest little railroad in the world" rich.
This exhibit honors that heritage — the men underground and the railroad that carried what they dug into daylight.
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