Manassas Gap Railroad

[1] With Edward Carrington Marshall as president and financial assistance from the Virginia Board of Public Works, construction was started westward in 1851 from a junction with the Orange and Alexandria Railroad (O&A) at Tudor Hall in Prince William County (a location the railroads called Manassas Junction).

The tracks ran toward Front Royal and through Manassas Gap in the Blue Ridge Mountains to the Shenandoah Valley.

The original plan included a branch through Loudoun County to connect to Harpers Ferry and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.

Similarly, efforts began in 1854 on the "Independent Line," 35 miles of track from Alexandria to Gainesville intended to bypass the O&A.

After initially trapping this rolling stock on the Virginia-controlled portion of the Baltimore & Ohio, Jackson immediately "helped himself to four small locomotives not too heavy for the flimsy flat-bar rails of the Winchester and Potomac Railroad, and had them sent to Winchester"[4] where they were disassembled near Fort Collier, mounted onto special dollies and wagons, and hauled by 40-horse teams "down the Valley turnpike to the [Manassas Gap] railroad at Strasburg".

Jackson, the end of the southern spur of the Manassas Gap Railroad, to tend to the wounded from Northern Virginia battlefields who were transported in the early part of the war by rail to the hospital.

"[7] The Battle of Tom's Brook on October 9, 1864 was fought in significant part directly upon the line of the Manassas Gap Railroad.

The B&O also acquired or built track to connect its east-west main line at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, with Winchester and Strasburg, and south past Harrisonburg to eventually reach Lexington.

At the junction, the new Norfolk and Western Railway turned a tiny flag stop named Big Lick into the new railroad city of Roanoke, Virginia, a few miles northeast of Salem.

Since the 1999 breakup of Conrail, when Norfolk Southern acquired the Lurgan Branch from the north end of the Hagerstown District into Pennsylvania, the B-Line east of Front Royal has been a major connection, allowing traffic on the Washington District to bypass Washington, D.C..

Having lost all local industrial customers, in 2016 this portion of the original Manassas Gap Railroad was put out of service by Norfolk Southern between Strasburg and Broadway, Virginia, roughly 38.5 miles (The Manassas Gap Railroad itself ended at Mt.

A regional group of public, private and non-profit organizations based in the counties of Shenandoah and Rockingham, Virginia have come together in an exploratory group called the Shenandoah Rail Trail Partnership to seek transformation of the rail corridor from Strasburg to Broadway into a multi-use trail.