The Fertilizer Route, more formally The Norfolk & Portsmouth Belt Line Railroad, featured 75 years ago in Trains Magazine was, in a word, “astonishing.”
For a railroad that almost nobody has ever heard of beyond its own neighborhood, the 27-mile Norfolk & Portsmouth Belt Line Railroad is an astonishing property. It has only eight stockholders, yet each is a class I common carrier of stature in Eastern Seaboard transportation (Atlantic Coast Line, Chesapeake & Ohio, Norfolk & Western, Norfolk Southern, Pennsylvania, Seaboard Air Line, Southern, and Virginian). These several parents, whose older locomotives power many N&PBL trains, are paid a 6 percent annual dividend by their bustling child of the wharves and are treated impartially on a traffic basis. The little line has an odd seasonal traffic, a fertilizer rush out of the South Norfolk and Berkely area which gets under way in February and lasts until early April. Its newest power is a set of 12 six-coupled switchers, all of which were built by Lima and Alco as U.S. Army 0-6-0’s. Several were purchased by Colorado’s Midland Terminal, equipped with pony trucks and operated as 2-6-0s into the twilight years of the now-abandoned MT. N&PBL is also a line which had a difficult time deciding on an emblem for the tanks of its engines (during the war American flags were painted on their cylinders); after six different efforts by company painters the insignia at the top of this page was selected.
The more than 130 industrial plants served by N&PBL crews in the Virginia port area which the road has done so much to build include oil depots, soy bean plants, lumber mills, gypsum plants, veneer factories and — of course — the fertilizer producers.
I was drawn to the picture on the cover of the May 1950 Trains Magazine, of UP Extra 1555 West. The locomotive was Alco-built 4-8-4 UP Class FEF-2 Northern #833, which still exists and cosmetically restored at the Utah State Railroading Museum at Ogden Union Station in Ogden, UT after sitting for many years in the open at Salt Lake City’s Pioneer Park.
As a note, isn’t the subject railroad in the story the one currently being argued over by CSX (Chessie System, Family Lines successor) and NS (Norfolk and Western, Southern Railway, Clinchfield and Virginian successor) over rights of trains in the south Chesapeake Bay area? My how being able to get along for the common good has surely changed in this dog eat dog world we live in…