Ball's Hole on the Radford Division

NW Mailing List nw-mailing-list at nwhs.org
Thu Mar 12 17:30:23 EDT 2020


It’s my impression that “Balls” was a telegraph office about three miles east of Elliston, and a dip in the alignment near there was known as Balls Hole.  My understanding is that pushers wored westbound trains from there and when the westbound grade to Christiansburg was eased out to 1.3 per cent and the line was double tracked from Roanoke to Elliston before 1900 that the office at Balls was closed.  Doesn’t have to be correct, but probably close.

- Ed King

From: NW Mailing List 
Sent: Thursday, March 12, 2020 5:07 PM
To: NW Mailing List 
Subject: Ball's Hole on the Radford Division

Back in late 2016, we had a discussion on the list about the location on the Radford Division of Ball's Hole and BA tower. While working through the subject index cards for President's Johnson's correspondence at GOB East, I ran across an entry for "Elliston to Glenvar Change in alignment of Balls Hole". I pulled out file no. 4724, which had two letters. The first was from N. D. Maher, 2nd Vice President and General Manager, to Johnson, suggesting that taking out Ball's Hole would be an improvement that would save money. Johnson's reply was that it was a good idea but the money for the project would be better spent elsewhere. His suggestion was to reduce the speed to 25 MPH and enforce it, and avoid running freight and passenger trains through at the same time.

It was interesting to see top management refer to this location specifically as Ball's Hole; now to dig some more to see if the source of that name can be documented.

Bruce in Blacksburg


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