Slide- Shaffers Crossing, West End of Motive Power Yard, Steam

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Cardinal James O'Cochran doth ask about the location depicted in his slide.

Good Sir, the location be Shaffers Crossing, West Roanoke, and the camera looks westwardly. The coordinates for the camera be approximately :
37.27892 , -79.97814

What you see from left to right is:

1. The Receiving Yard. The train at left looks like it is standing in Track 16. The caboose is on Track 20, I think.

2. The Eng with the headlight displayed is on the Eastbound Running Track. Almost certainly it has just come "out of the House" (i.e. out of the Motive Power tracks) and reversed to head to Park Street for an east, south or northbound train.

Immmediately to the right of this Engine is an unoccupied track with a Position Light Dwarf Signal on it. I think that is the Westbound Running Track. The dwarf functions only as a switch indicator, and is not controlled by human hand or track circuit. It will show Stop if the switches of the crossover are reversed, and Restricting if the switches are set "straight."

3. Immmediately to the right of the Eng with the headlight displayed is a small gray shanty. That is the world corporate headquarters of the 30th Street Switchtender, whose job it was to handle switches for Engines arriving and departing the Motive Power Yard. There were two ladders out of sight at right: the Empty Side Ladder and the Motive Power Ladder. They laid side-by-side and each had ten tracks branching off. I used to love looking down those ladders in the darkness, and seeing 18 or 20 brightly lit switch lamps, all showing either red or green.

4. To the right of the shanty, it looks like there is one of those D-thingies in the Empty Side Yard. From whence came that vile, ugly and unwelcome beast ?

4. The tender at right is that is almost certainly that of a passenger engine: witness the steam line hanging below the drawhead.

Between this passenger tender and the tender partially visible at extreme right, can be seen a little bit of a low brick building we called "the Long House." I think the N&W billed it as their "Lubritorium," or somesuch. Inbound Engines were lubricated there.

The big mountain in the background is Fort Lewis Mountain. The peak you see is Twelve O'Clock Knob, almost six miles distant. Although the name "Twelve O'Clock Knob" sounds like a glitzy, made-up marketing ploy of some real estate shill, to inflate the prices of whatever he is peddling, that name appears on maps which pre-date the War of Northern Aggression.

And finally a little meditation about that ugly yellow hillside cut which appears just right of center. I pay attention to cuts and soils and rocks. That soil is yellow clay and is somewhat light and mealey, rather than thick and glucilaginous, as are most heavy clays. I would love to know the soil-chemistry which makes it yellow, as most of the clays in southern Virginia are ferrous-bearing and have a tint ranging from light brown to a somewhat deep red. Along the north side of the railroad at Roanoke, from about 18th Street westward to the viscinity of the Veterans' Hospital, a distance of about 3.25 miles, is rolling terrain into which the railroad has made a number of side cuts exposing this yellow clay. What amazes me is that nothing grows in the soil of most of these cuts! If anyone can enlighten me about the chemistry of this soil, I would be grateful and will grace your dinner table with some fine... yeah, you know... Turnips !

All of the above information is based on memories almost a half-century old. The last time I saw that area was 1979. So I gladly yield the floor on this topic to Col. K. Miller of the Salem Grays, Attorney Jerome Sanderman, Past Grand Cyclops of the Roanoke Chapter NRHS, and to our Honorable Engineman, James Lisle, one of the early employees of the Shenandoah Valley RR.

-- abram burnett
Diplomatic Mission of the Autonimous Turnip Patch to the United States of America
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