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.
