Lee's Last Lifeline: The Richmond & Danville

LEE'S LAST LIFELINE: THE RICHMOND & DANVILLE Angus }. Johnston, II The Richmond & Danville provides a unique opportunity to study wartime railroads in Virginia because it was the last of the fourteen major Confederate lines in the state to be molested by the enemy. This fortuitous circumstance affords a chance to investigate not only the indirect influences of the war upon the railroad, but it also furnishes an example ofthe manifold problems arising from labor and material shortages , inflation, deterioration of equipment, and governmental interference . Beyond this, however, lies the fact that the Richmond & Danville 's importance greatly increased during the last year of the war. With the completion of the Piedmont Railroad—virtually the only new road built in the Confederacy—a rail connection was established between the R. & D.'s southern terminal, Danville, and the rail network of North Carolina and the lower South. At the beginning of the war, the Richmond & Danville had been in operation slightly more than adecade.1 Anglingin a southwesterly direction from Richmond, it ran 140 miles through an agricultural region and ended abruptly at Danville near the North Carolina boundary. Its southern terminus was almost fifty miles from the nearest railroad in the Tarheel state. Indeed, the only line with which it came in physical contact was the South Side Railroad, another broad gauge (five feet) line which ran from Petersburg to Lynchburg and intersected the Richmond & Danville at Burkeville, some fifty-three miles southwest of Richmond.2 Dr. Johnston teaches advanced history courses at New Trier Township High School, Winnetka, Illinois. His book Virginia Railroads in the Civil War, has just been released by the University of North Carolina Press. 1 Chartered in 1847, operations on the railroad began late in 1850. Seventeenth Annual Report of the Richmond ir Danville Railroad Company . . . (Richmond, 1864), p. 409. Hereafter cited as 17th Report (1864); similar short references will be used for all company reports. 2 Four other railroads originated in Richmond, but the fact that all were of the modern standard gauge (4 feet, 88 inches) prohibited their making connections with the R. & D. For a map of Virginia lines, see Angus J. Johnston, II, "Virginia Railroads in April 1861," Journal of Southern History, XXIII (1957), 309. 288 Despite its ten years of operation, the Richmond & Danville had a decidedly unfinished look in 1861. Under-capitalized from the start yet anxious to begin operations, the company had built makeshift stations and freighthouses along the line, intending to replace them with permanent structures as soon as funds were available from earnings. Far more serious from a wartime point of view, however, was the fact that approximately forty-eight miles of track in April, 1861, consisted of rather badly worn "flat bar" or "strap" rail laid on wooden stringers. Fortunately more than three-quarters of the strap rail lay southwest of Burkeville on a section of the road that received considerably less travel early in the war than that northeast of Burkeville, where passengers bound for Richmond transferred from the South Side line. Nevertheless, as the war dragged on and traffic increased, the strap rail grew more and more unreliable and was the cause of practically every accident on the road.3 In an attempt to overcome this problem, the management very early in the war began removing heavy "T" rail from its sidings and, when this proved inadequate, was obliged to importune the government for aid in the summer of 1862. Recognizing the growing importance of the Richmond & Danville, the Confederacy departed from its characteristic laissez faire policy long enough to secure sufficient heavy rail to replace all the remaining strap rail on the Richmond-Burkeville section.4 Ironically , further improvement resulted from Federal raids in 1864, after which all but eleven miles of the strap rail southwest of Burkeville was replaced before the war's end. No matter how satisfactory or indifferent the track, the lifeblood of a railroad is its machinery. Fortunately for the Confederacy, the Richmond & Danville's locomotives were decidedly better than its superstructure . In April, 1861, the company owned twenty-three wood-burners of the "American," or 4-4-0 type. Of these, eight had been built in Richmond at the famed Tredegar...