A large collection of historical records from the Norfolk & Western Railway Company and the Southern Railway Company were deposited in the University Libraries' Special Collections in the mid-1980s. Norfolk Southern Corporation (NSCorp), however, retained ownership of these materials and requested their return in preparation of their own corporate archives. The materials were returned to NSCorp in 2006.
Virginia Tech's Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA) continues to be a source of railroad history with more than 200 cu. ft. of business records and drawings, photographs, personal papers and publications relating to various regional railroads from the 1840s to the 1980s. More than 12,000 scanned images from NSCorp and other sources continue to be available through the VT ImageBase, one of our most popular online resources.
A list of manuscript collections relating to railroad history is available online through Virginia Heritage. Print resources relating to railroad history can be found using the library’s catalog. We encourage you to contact SCUA (specref@vt.edu) with railroad history queries, and we can help connect you to the archives at NSCorp if we do not have the records you seek.