The Virginia Museum of Transportation features several steam locomotives from the bygone era of the now defunct Norfolk & Western. The N&W was a major regional rail artery supplying the coal and consumer needs of Virginia and parts of the Midwestern United States. Massive, hundred foot long steel behemoths could be spotted on a day to day basis hauling trains into the Blue Ridge Mountains. However, by the 1950s, the steam era was drawing to a close, and railroads across the United States began to scrap their steam locomotives and replace them with simpler, more cost effective diesels. Norfolk & Western had held to the uncommon practice of designing and building many of their locomotives in their Roanoke, Virginia shops, not too far up the tracks from the museum. Now, the art of keeping such machines running has become forgotten and an expensive, difficult proposition. The relative few steam engines that have survived now sit, as N&W 1218 does, as silent memories of a day since long gone.
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