The Elusive "WB," West Roanoke -- FOUND !

[NW Mailing List]

“WB” is a name which has been in the N&W vocabulary for over a hundred
years.  For 66 years of those years, I have looked for its exact location,
without resolution.  The older men who were still working when I hired
(1964) remembered the place, but could not give an accurate location.

The original WB was a telegraph office at the west end of Roanoke Yard,
somewhere near the connection with the west end of the Roanoke Belt Line.
My guess is that WB functioned as a Train Order office (that’s what almost
all “telegraph offices” did on the N&W.)  But exactly where this facility
was located, has heretofore not been determined.   And it may have been
moved westwardly, as the yard was extended.

Thanks to Mr. Miller’s masterful Excel file, drenched with the sweat of
midnight oil and cataloging the appearance, and the disappearance, of
locations from Radford Division Time Tables, we know that WB first appeared
in the Time Table of Jan 4, 1917 under the name West Belt Line Jct.  West
Belt Line Jct makes its last appearance in Time Table No. 16 of May 29,
1921, after which date the name is changed to WB, and it is apparently no
longer a Train Order Office.

But now, thanks to the posting of the N&W Valuation Maps  by the National
Archives & Records Administration, we have the answer !   N&W Valuation
Map, section, Sheet 20, dated June 30, 1916 (but probably submitted several
years after that date,) at a scale of 1” to 100’, shows a structure,
designated as a Telegraph Office at the requisite location.  The surveyors
noted their measurements to the foot, and sometimes to the 0.5 foot.  Doing
a lot of manipulation with seven-digit footage measurement numbers ("the
Plusses," in surveyor's lingo,)  we can determine that the centerline of
the building at WB stood 4731 feet west of the centerline of the culvert
carrying Peters Creek under the railroad, and 5430 feet east of the
centerline of the bridge over Mason’s Creek.  The eastbound Yard Limit
Board stood on the opposite of the tracks from WB and 682 feet to the west.

Using our age’s greatest earth referencing system, approximate coordinates
would be  37.2726, -80.0088 .  Paste these coordinates into the Google Maps
search box and you will be taken to the approximate location where  WB
Telegraph office stood on the north side of the Westbound Main Line.  My
guess is that they bring us within a hundred feet of the old structure’s
location.  (The wild card, of course, is that the railroad has been widened
from 3 tracks to 14 tracks at this point, but I think most of the widening
was done by shifting the channel of the river southward and filling in to
the south of the original roadbed.)

To make this easier, stand on the centerline of the present Peters Creek
Road bridge over the railroad, between Roanoke and Salem, and look westward
348 feet… WB stood on the north side of the trackage.  Expressed another
way, WB stood 1500 feet east of the westbound home signal bridge at present
WB Interlocking.

The Val map also gives a clue as to WB’s function.  The tower stood at the
west end of a pull out track which lay between the two Main tracks and
extended eastwardly about 4000 feet, to the west end of the yard.  This
pull out track connected to the Westbound Main track at WB.   WB obviously
handled this switch, but whether by hand or by interlocking, the Val map
gives us no indication.  To the west of the tower was a trailing point
crossover between the two Main tracks which may, or may not, have been
handled by the Operator at WB.  Also, it would be logical to use an office
at that location for Clearance Cards and Train Orders for westbound trains
departing the yard.  One guesses that WB did not serve as a Block Station
for the blocking of trains, as the N&W had installed automatic block
signals (semaphores) on the Main Line beginning in 1906, and we have no
evidence  that trains were ever blocked on the Roanoke Belt Line.

Attached is an edited screenshot of a small portion of the map, showing WB
Telegraph Office.  Don’t be spooked by the lettering “F.C. Board.”   That
is a landowner’s name, not the designation of some railroad artifact.
CAVEAT:  On the N&W Vals, North is down and South is up.  Why would anybody
in the Northern Hemisphere do a map in that orientation ... ?

So, I am satisfied that I have found WB.  Hopefully you will be satisfied
with the reasoning and the explanation, too.

Now, where is a photograph of WB?  It is likely that the Valuation
Inventory team photographed the structure.  The Venerable Bill Harman, of
Christiansburg, told me he had seen a photograph of the place and recalled
it as a “fairly large structure” (i.e. not just a railroad shanty,) so we
know it was photographed at least once.

 -- abram burnett,

Intercontinental Ballistic Turnips, LLC

.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://pairlist6.pair.net/pipermail/nw-mailing-list/attachments/20250705/ef9d5e64/attachment-0001.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: N&W WB Telegraph Office west of Roanoke _ Valuation Map Sect 10, Sheet 20.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 5045254 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://pairlist6.pair.net/pipermail/nw-mailing-list/attachments/20250705/ef9d5e64/attachment-0001.jpg>