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Railroad Museum

The Williamson Area Railroad Museum set out to do one thing well: keep the memory of the Norfolk & Western alive in the town that the railway essentially created. Housed in old rail cars parked at the Armor Crossing on Prichard Street, it gathered railroad memorabilia, preserved cars and a model railroad devoted to the rich N&W heritage of the southern West Virginia coalfields. Like so many small volunteer museums in a shrinking coal town, it has since closed permanently, but the story it told is still written all over Williamson. To understand a railroad museum in Williamson, you have to start with the railroad itself. The Norfolk & Western built its main line through here in 1892, and the city grew up around the depot it planned along the Tug Fork, at the West Virginia–Kentucky line. Within a few decades the N&W had turned Williamson into one of its great divisional hubs, a sprawling complex of yards, shops and roundhouses whose traffic was exceeded only by the company's main yards at Roanoke, Virginia. The museum was the small human-scale counterpoint to that giant industrial story.