Heritage Museum’s next stop: Waynesboro ... and its railroad legacy

By Bob Stuart

Published: July 5, 2008

Waynesboro’s vibrant railroad history, starting with the arrival of the first passenger train in 1854, is on display this month and next at the Waynesboro Heritage Museum.
Visitors to the museum at the corner Wayne Avenue and Main Street will learn that Waynesboro offered a unique junction for railroads. The Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad’s east-west line came through the city, as did the north-south line of the Norfolk & Western Railroad.
And while there is no longer a train station in Waynesboro, pictures and captions detail the city’s rich legacy of stations.
The C&O Railroad built a wooden passenger depot on Ohio Avenue west of Port Republic Road in 1873. A few decades later, in 1907, that station was replaced by a brick station at the intersection of North Wayne and Ohio avenues.
Shirley Bridgeforth, president of the Heritage Museum board, said many museum visitors share their stories of past train trips from Waynesboro.
“They met their loved ones here or saw them off,” said Bridgeforth.
Recently, a museum visitor talked of the many train trips they took from Waynesboro to Williamsburg and back.
Artifacts from the city’s rail past are on display throughout the exhibit.
Dining-car china from the George Washington passenger trains run by C&O Railroad decades ago sits in a glass case.
Telltale signs, used to warn trains of a low clearance ahead, hang on the walls.
The blue uniform worn by a train brakeman, who was responsible for coupling and uncoupling cars and checking the train brakes before a train departed, stands sentry in a corner.
Bridgeforth said the exhibit was put together with the help of the Norfolk & Western Archives in Lynchburg and the C&O Historical Society in Clifton Forge.
Museum visitors can peruse the exhibit from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday through Aug. 23.
Bridgeforth said the museum is averaging about 200 visitors per month. Attendance has been boosted by a Virginia Department of Transportation sign on Interstate 64 at the Lyndhurst exit.
“We are also getting a number of church groups,” she said.
The museum’s next exhibit will open in September. Quilting in Waynesboro, from the past to the present to the future, will be on display then.