Chesapeake & Ohio

Chesapeake and Ohio. Easternmost Terminus. Right in the middle of this playground stood, for a time, the easternmost terminus of one of America's great train lines, the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway. It was the dream of railroad magnate and shipbuilder Collis P. Huntington to augment transcontinental rail service from the Pacific to the Atlantic. In 1881, he began the extension of the Chesapeake and Ohio railroad, already existing from Cincinnati to Richmond, down to Newport News in order to carry West Virginian coal to a shipping point. Harrison Phoebus, the enterprising owner of the palatial Hygeia Hotel, helped convince Huntington to push the Chesapeake and Ohio Engine 449 on the Turntable in Phoebus line all the way to Old Point. At first he had to stop in what became Phoebus because the Army opposed the project, and guests bound for the Hygeia had to be transported to the resort by carriage. It was a measure of Phoebus's persistence that the station, and eventually the town, was named for him., Finally, in 1889, the Army relented and construction began on a train trestle across Mill Creek and a train station next to Fort Monroe, called by one historian "a tour de force in Victorian gingerbread architecture." A historic marker on the fort near the marina shows the location of Milepost Zero. From there, the line extended 664.9 miles to Cincinnati. Milepost 1 was at Phoebus. Because there was no place at Old Point to turn around, the train apparently pivoted at a turntable near the present ballpark on Willard Avenue and backed all the way to the fort., An advertisement in 1905 showed the train departures from Old Point Comfort and Phoebus three minutes apart. In the same year, the round-trip fare to Richmond was one dollar. There were special excursion trips from Richmond to a new, popular resort, Buckroe Beach, thanks to a spur connecting the trains to special wide gauge trolley tracks. The Phoebus station burned down in 1964, leaving a trail or two through the woods as the only evidence that trains once passed this way., Bringing History to Life , For more visitor information visit: www.visithampton.com , in partnership with Virginia Civil War Trails, www.civilwartrails.org. , (caption) Chesapeake and Ohio Engine 449 on the Turntable in Phoebus , Courtesy of the Hampton History Museum