The story below is from our September/October 2019 issue. For the full issue Subscribe today, view our FREE interactive digital edition or download our FREE iOS app!
Photo Courtesy of the Virginia Room
Today, much of the Virginia Museum of Transportation’s original collection is mired somewhere in the muddy bottom of the Roanoke River.
Hurricane Juan had moved steadily north from the Gulf Coast through the Carolinas and into Virginia in the fall of 1985. By early November, it was over the Roanoke Valley, and then it stalled. November 4th became the worst flood in Roanoke’s recorded history.
Bev Fitzpatrick, Jr., had just left his job as president and director of the Virginia Museum of Transportation the week prior for another position. In California at a conference, he called home to his wife. “All that week she said it was raining.”
Fitzpatrick knew the museum along the Roanoke River in Wasena Park may be in trouble. The museum, formerly called the Roanoke Transportation Museum, had opened in 1963 to much fanfare. Some 500 citizens attended the formal ribbon-cutting on May 30th and listened to Norfolk & Western Railway President Stuart Saunders, Mayor Murray Stoller, and the William Fleming High School Band.
The Memorial Day weekend’s opening had a number of main attractions, including the N&W’s J-611 steam locomotive and The General, a Civil War-era train engine pulling a 1913 coach brought in just for the occasion. Visitors on opening weekend totaled 5,000.
Big Lick Station, a stone structure created to mimic a passenger station, housed railroad memorabilia, exhibits and a massive H&O gauge model train layout operated by the Roanoke Valley Model Railroad Club. It was billed as “one of the largest computerized layouts in the South.” In addition to railroad locomotives, there were antique cars, horse-drawn carriages, an early fire engine, and a hearse used by Oakey’s Funeral Service a century prior.
Later came the U.S. Army’s Jupiter Rocket, the nose of which could be seen protruding above Wasena Bridge by passing traffic. Wiley Drive was constructed to link the museum and the park to the Blue Ridge Parkway, something Saunders noted in his opening day remarks.
The museum drew tourists, historians, rail fans and schoolchildren for over two decades before the remnant of Hurricane Juan swelled the Roanoke River. “We lost almost everything we worked so hard to attain,” recalls Fitzpatrick. Inside the Big Lick Station, the water reached the eaves, destroying the model train layout and exhibits with a sea of muck. Archival materials that were stored in rail cars were gone.
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