In 1851, the Haight family of Sully and other neighbors anticipated a railroad reaching western Fairfax County, which would have let them move farm products quickly to the port town of Alexandria. Because train tracks required a flat, level surface, construction called for deep excavations and heavy earthmoving, begun with enslaved workers and hired hands. The planned line was to run from Fairfax City toward the headwaters of Cub Run and cut across a corner of Sully, but by 1857 funding and other problems ended the effort to extend the Manassas Gap Rail into this part of the county. Although the railway bed was prepared, the tracks were never laid, and unused bridge abutments and culvert stones from the failed project still remain visible in places such as the Cub Run Stream valley in Centreville and Annandale, Virginia.