The Kanawha and Pocahontas Railroad Company was incorporated in West Virginia in 1898 by either a son or the estate of Charles Pratt to reach new coal mining territory on land which was owned and/or leased by Gallego Coal & Land Company, Charles Pratt and Company, and other investors based in New York City.[1][2]
The line was constructed in 1902 as a narrow gauge railroad and originated at the mainline of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway (C&O) at what was called Paint Creek Junction along the Kanawha River. It ran 14 miles (23 km) along a tributary of the river called Paint Creek to Kingston, crossing the Kanawha-Fayette county line about one mile south of Burnwell.
Represented by attorney (and former West Virginia governor) William A. MacCorkle, industrialist Henry Huttleston Rogers, acting on behalf of Charles Pratt and Company, negotiated its lease of the entire line to the C&O. It later came under ownership of the C&O, and was later known as the C&O's Paint Creek Branch.[2]
(EDIT) There is no proof that HH Rogers was involved in this project. Gov. MacCorkle in his book (pp 412) relates that he talked with Rogers about this later and that Rogers thought that it was a blunder by the Pratt interests to sell this property. (TWS)
Around the same time, Henry Rogers was also involved with another nearby short-line railroad, the Deepwater Railway, which ran up Loup Creek in Fayette County. It also connected with the C&O along the Kanawha River, and was run by the C&O in its early years. However, the Deepwater Railway, headed by mining manager and developer William Nelson Page, and funded by Rogers, was eventually extended east to the West Virginia-Virginia state line, at which point it connected with the new Tidewater Railway, a line which Page and Rogers built to connect all the way east across Virginia to a new coal pier at Sewell's Point in the harbor of Hampton Roads. In 1907, they were combined to form the Virginian Railway, now a portion of the Norfolk Southern Railway.
^"Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2010-05-21. Retrieved 2008-09-21.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
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tram and other steam machinery were used for collecting timber used as railroad ties in the railway construction along the Kanawha river. Railroad spurs...
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stimulating such private enterprises as the James River andKanawha Canal, the Chesterfield Railroad, and the Valley Turnpike. Claudius Crozet's innovative...
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by way of the Tygart Valley and Little Kanawha Rivers. Planned and approved in 1826 and completed in 1848, the Staunton and Parkersburg was maintained...
active line in West Virginia between Maben and Deepwater and operate it under the Kanawha River Railroad (KNWA) to load trains from Norfolk Southern...
Deepwater Railway, a short-line railroad chartered to stretch between the C&O at its line along the Kanawha River and the N&W at Matoaka—a distance of...
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Valley and the Virginia Central Railroad at Covington, Virginia. To the west, the road led to the Kanawha River Valley and Charleston. The Huntersville Turnpike...
situation occurred in the counties of Cabell, Kanawhaand Wayne. One factor hindering Unionism was "state pride" and resistance to outside interference in Virginia's...
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