Electric Trains on the W&OD
Electrification arrived in 1912, after the Great Falls & Old Dominion Railroad and the Southern Railway’s Bluemont Branch were consolidated into the Washington & Old Dominion Railway. The new owners brought modern interurban trolley cars. Wire strung above the tracks carried electricity from the railroad’s own power plant in Rosslyn, Virginia. In 1917 service switched to the local utility company.
By 1939, the year this man was photographed departing a trolley near Bluemont, Virginia, the W&OD had been operating on electricity for 27 years. Aging equipment was badly in need of modernization. In the early 1940s the railroad obtained its first self-propelled diesel-electric and gas-electric engines. Diesel power proved so efficient that by 1944 it had replaced electricity.
Marker is on North Maple Avenue (County Route 722), on the right when traveling west.
Courtesy hmdb.org
