Trains have always inspired the people who lived alongside them. Long after the last Virginian coal drag rolled through Princeton, the railroad lives on in the work of artists who remember it.
The paintings gathered here capture what the photographs can't quite hold — the weight and motion of a loaded coal train, the color of the equipment, the mood of the line in its working years. They are part history and part tribute.
Art like this helps a new generation feel what the railroad was: not just machinery, but the beating heart of a coalfield community.
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