agricultural but with scattered industrial
towns and cities, all of the latter dependent
on their railroads.
The interweaving of geology and geogra-
phy explains why this particular highway
goes through so many important railroad
shop towns: All of the Class I railroads’
shops on our route supported the transport
of coal — the N&W, C&O, and B&O all had
massive export facilities on the Atlantic; the
Pennsy and New York Central moved coal
both to the Midwestern steel industry and to
the huge population centers on the East
Coast; the Lehigh Valley moved anthracite
to the west from northeastern Pennsylvania.
Except for the Valley, which chose a location
roughly halfway along its main line from
New York Harbor to Buffalo, N.Y., all of
these railroads built their shops close to
their busiest coal fields and at the foot of the
mountains against which many locomotiveswould have to labor. With the development
of highways, their planners aimed the routes
through the places where the most people
lived. Although at right angles to the rail-
roads, U.S. 220 had its path defined by them.
U.S. 220 does not parallel the main lines:
Most major railroads in the mid-Atlantic
U.S. run east-west, connecting the coast
with Chicago; topography may suggest the
possibilities of railroads running in different
directions — through the valleys — but not
enough business existed in many rural dis-
tricts to make rail through-routes necessary.
Even U.S. 220’s designers would not have
thought of it as a through-route: Railroads
carried more than three-quarters of all
freight in the 1920s and produced more
than 95% of intercity passenger-miles.
Although the private automobile and the
semi-truck have radically changed America
since then, U.S. 220’s role has remained thesame, as local transportation among a series
of otherwise unrelated places.
In Petersburg, W.Va., we come to one
arm of the Potomac River and the head-
quarters of the state-owned South Branch
Valley Railroad, once a Baltimore & Ohio
property that until the 1930s transported
students to the high school up in Romney.
The Potomac Eagle operates passenger
trains with vintage diesels from Romney;
the South Branch Valley likewise uses 1950s
Geeps to move freight. In less than 10 miles,
U.S. 220 misses Romney by a few miles and
instead goes through Keyser, W.Va., once
the location of a B&O coal-marshalling yard
complete with roundhouse, turntable, and
machine shop — all of the buildings docu-
mented by the Historic American Engineer-
ing Record in 1984 and all of them subse-
quently demolished. The two-story brick
station, dating to around 1875 and designed46 OCTOBER 20199 Amtrak train No. 30, the eastbound Capitol Limited, arrives at Cumberland, Md., in
November 2013. Chase Gunnoe 10 A Potomac Eagle Scenic Railroad train crosses the Sycamore
Bridge at milepost 31.7 en route to Petersburg, W.Va., on Aug. 10, 2018. Alex Mayes 11 Cass
Scenic Railroad Shay No. 2 lumbers across Leatherbark Creek in May 2007. Walter Scriptunas II
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