The Peninsula Extension which created the Peninsula Subdivision of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway (C&O) was the new railroad line on the Virginia Peninsula from Richmond to southeastern Warwick County. Its principal purpose was to provide an important new pathway for coal mined in West Virginia to reach the harbor of Hampton Roads for coastal and export shipping on collier ships.
Completed on October 16, 1881, the new double-tracked railroad and the other development visions of industrialist Collis Potter Huntington resulted in a 15-year transition of the rural farm village of Newport News into a new independent city which also became home to the world's largest shipyard. The railroad, one of the later developed in Virginia, became important to many communities, opening transportation options, and stimulating commerce and military operations on the Peninsula throughout the 20th century.
Over 125 years after it opened, many of the stations are gone. Spur lines have both come and gone. Also gone are the steam locomotives, save one on display at Huntington Park in Newport News, another at the Science Museum of Virginia in Richmond, and a third which was left buried in Richmond's Church Hill Tunnel.
Despite the changes, in the early 21st century, the rails of the Peninsula Subdivision continue to form an important link for Amtrak service from Williamsburg and Newport News. High quality bituminous coal was the motivation for originally building the line, and current owner CSX Transportation continues day and night to deliver massive amounts of it to be loaded onto ships destined for points worldwide.
Chesapeake and Ohio Railway
Opening at the outset of the final quarter of the 19th century, the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway (C&O) was the fulfillment of a long-held goal of Virginians.
Many years before the American Revolution, George Washington, a Virginian licensed as a surveyor by the College of William and Mary during the colonial era, identified the importance of a transportation link between the navigable waters flowing to the Atlantic Ocean and those across the Eastern Continental Divide in the Allegheny Mountains which lead to the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico. He had mapped out several potential routes, and in 1785, he been an early investor in a canal venture.
The James River was navigable east from the Fall Line at Richmond and Manchester to Hampton Roads, the Chesapeake Bay, and the Atlantic Ocean. However, from these sister cities at the head of navigation, of rapids marked the transition to the Piedmont Region, and only very shallow craft such as bateau boats could navigate portions of the river from that point west. Over from Richmond, across the Blue Ridge Mountains, the Shenandoah Valley, and what was called the "Transmountaine" region in old Virginia, better known in modern times as the Alleghany Mountains, were the falls of the Kanawha River. They similarly marked the head of navigation, but from the west. From the falls of the Kanawha, ships could follow the river to its confluence with the Ohio River, which in turn, flowed west to the Mississippi River. In the earlier periods during which a transportation link was contemplated, the Colony of Virginia (according to the British and its own calculations) extended all the way to the west to what is now Cairo, Illinois, where the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers join. Of course, transportation was not the only obstacle to developing these western regions, as both the French and the Indians did not see it the same way.
In any event, that gap in the navigable waters became a major focus for Virginians. By the end of the 18th century, efforts to link these heads of navigation were underway with the building of turnpikes and canals. Work on the James River and Kanawha Turnpike and the James River and Kanawha Canal, both prominent infrastructure improvements, was partially funded by the Virginia General Assembly through the Virginia Board of Public Works, although the canal was never completed. By the 1830s, railroads were emerging as a favorable technology for such purposes, and Virginia's network of turnpikes, canals, and railroads grew, substantially guided by the civil engineering skills of Claudius Crozet. Both railroads and canals had conquered the Blue Ridge Mountains and entered the Shenandoah Valley region when the American Civil War broke out in 1861, bringing new work to a virtual halt. By the end of the War in 1865, many of Virginia's railroads, turnpikes, and canals lay in ruins, although the related debt which had helped fund building them was still outstanding.