The Commonwealth Railway, Inc. is a

United States The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...

Class III

short-line railroad A shortline railroad is a small or mid-sized railroad company that operates over a relatively short distance relative to larger, national railroad networks. The term is used primarily in the United States and Canada. In the former, railroads are ...

operating of track of a former

Norfolk, Franklin and Danville Railway The Atlantic and Danville Railway was a Class I railroad which operated in Virginia and North Carolina. The company was founded in 1882 and opened its mainline between Portsmouth, Virginia and Danville, Virginia in 1890. The Southern Railway le ...

line from

Suffolk, Virginia Suffolk ( ) is an independent city (United States), independent city in Virginia, United States. As of 2020, the population was 94,324. It is the List of cities in Virginia, 10th-most populous city in Virginia, the largest city in Virginia by bou ...

, to

Portsmouth, Virginia Portsmouth is an Independent city (United States), independent city in southeastern Virginia, United States. It lies across the Elizabeth River (Virginia), Elizabeth River from Norfolk, Virginia, Norfolk. As of the 2020 United States census, 2020 ...

. The main office is in the Wilroy area of Suffolk. Commonwealth Railway was acquired by Genesee & Wyoming Inc. in 1996 (who still owns it today) and is a part of Norfolk Southern's "Thoroughbred Shortline Program". It interchanges with

Norfolk Southern The Norfolk Southern Railway is a Class I freight railroad operating in the Eastern United States. Headquartered in Atlanta, the company was formed in 1982 with the merger of the Norfolk and Western Railway and Southern Railway. The comp ...

and

CSX CSX Transportation , known colloquially as simply CSX, is a Railroad classes, Class I freight railroad company operating in the Eastern United States and the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec. Operating about 21,000 route miles () of trac ...

Norfolk, Virginia Norfolk ( ) is an independent city (United States), independent city in the U.S. state of Virginia. It had a population of 238,005 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, making it the List of cities in Virginia, third-most populous city ...

History

An important industry on the line was the

BASF BASF SE (), an initialism of its original name , is a European Multinational corporation, multinational company and the List of largest chemical producers, largest chemical producer in the world. Its headquarters are located in Ludwigshafen, Ge ...

Chemical plant in the West Norfolk area of Portsmouth. The plant was usually switched by locomotive #444, a

GP16 The EMD GP16 is a series of rebuilt diesel locomotive, diesel-electric locomotives, a result of a remanufacturing program initiated by the Seaboard Coast Line Railroad (SCL) in an effort to spare the cost of purchasing new motive power in the la ...

class locomotive rebuilt by

Seaboard Coast Line Railroad The Seaboard Coast Line Railroad was a Class I railroad company operating in the Southeastern United States beginning in 1967. Its passenger operations were taken over by Amtrak in 1971. Eventually, the railroad was merged with its affiliate lin ...

in the early 1980s. The main locomotive was #517, a

CF7 The Santa Fe CF7 is an EMD F-unit railroad locomotive that has had its in order to adapt the unit for switcher, switching duty. All of the conversions were performed by the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway's Cleburne, Texas, workshops between ...

rebuild of an

EMD F7 The EMD F7 is a model of diesel-electric locomotive produced between February 1949 and December 1953 by the Electro-Motive Division of General Motors (EMD) and General Motors Diesel (GMD). Although originally promoted by EMD as a freight-h ...

performed by the

Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway , often referred to as the Santa Fe or AT&SF, was one of the largest Class 1 railroads in the United States between 1859 and 1996. The Santa Fe was a pioneer in intermodal freight transport; at vario ...

in the 1970s. The BASF plant closed in 2007 and was subsequently demolished. A small chemical company remains on the site. Another important industry is ''APM Terminals'', which is a modern shipping container port in Portsmouth along the Elizabeth River. This port was leased by

Maersk (), usually known simply as Maersk ( ), is a Danish Freight transport, shipping and logistics company founded in 1904 by Arnold Peter Møller and his father Peter Mærsk Møller. Maersk's business activities include Port operator, port operat ...

to the

Virginia Port Authority The Virginia Port Authority (VPA) is an autonomous agency ( political subdivision) of the Commonwealth of Virginia that owns The Port of Virginia, a group of facilities with their activity centered on the harbor of Hampton Roads, Virginia. The pr ...

in late 2010. Commonwealth Railway is the only rail line to access the port. Another port is planned for Craney Island; however, as of 2020 the port is still in the planning stage and has not been constructed. APM Terminals WJ Grimes

With the opening of this new container port, two

EMD SW1500 The EMD SW1500 is a diesel-electric switcher locomotive built by General Motors' Electro-Motive Division from 1966 to 1974. The SW1500 replaced the SW1200 in the EMD product line. Many railroads regularly used SW1500s for road freight service. ...

switch engines were added to the roster. To handle the container traffic to and from the port, the Commonwealth Railway line through the city of Portsmouth has been realigned down the

median The median of a set of numbers is the value separating the higher half from the lower half of a Sample (statistics), data sample, a statistical population, population, or a probability distribution. For a data set, it may be thought of as the “ ...

s of I-664 and SR 164, at a cost of $60 million. A small marshaling yard was built in the Baileytown area of Suffolk. Double-stack container service started in December 2010. A second phase, paid for by $9 million in federal stimulus funding, will further improve port access and is expected to be completed in September 2011.

Locomotives

The Commonwealth Railway had two GP20 locomotives numbered 2090 and 2091 which were sold in 2019 to Larry's Truck & Electric (LTEX) in McDonald, Ohio. By 2020 the Commonwealth Railway operated only one locomotive, an EMD GP15-1 numbered 1424, leased from LTEX. The company's remaining EMD SW1500, No. 1551, is leased to the International Paper Company in Franklin, Virginia. Image:CWRY444GP16.JPG, Rail Link Inc. #444, a GP16 rebuild, was used for switching along the Commonwealth Railway in

. It has since been transferred to the First Coast Railroad, another G&W property, in Fernandina Beach, Florida. Image:Suffolk Va.JPG, Locomotive #517 runs past the site of the new yard at

after switching the

plant. Today it sits behind a warehouse in the Wilroy industrial park, out of service and awaiting a scrapper to cut it up. Image:CWRY 1552 WJ Grimes.JPG, Commonwealth Railway #1552 an SW1500 parked at Wilroy in

. It has been transferred to the G&W's

Georgia Central Railway The Georgia Central Railway operates about of former Seaboard Coast Line track from Macon, Georgia through Dublin, Georgia and Vidalia, Georgia to Savannah, Georgia. It also operates about of trackage between Savannah and Riceboro, Georgia, sw ...

in Lyons, Georgia.Georgia Central Railway

References

External links

Commonwealth Railway official webpage - Genesee and Wyoming website

Pictures of CWRY Locomotives

{{DEFAULTSORT:Commonwealth Railway Virginia railroads Genesee & Wyoming Spin-offs of the Norfolk Southern Railway 1989 establishments in Virginia