As Mt. Hope emerged, one of the most important events in West Virginia's history was the completion of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad through the New River Gorge in 1873. The C&O was the first railroad to enter southern West Virginia and link the coalfields to outside markets. Nearly overnight, capitalists from the anthracite fields of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Ohio came to exploit the New River coal exposed along the gorge rim, where high-quality seams could be reached without elaborate shafts or slopes, and miners and railroad workers soon arrived in large numbers for employment. Coal company towns arose, supported by railroad facilities, hotels, and coal company offices at Thurmond, the gorge's service center, and by 1885 eleven mining companies in the gorge were shipping coal. This prosperity enlivened Mt. Hope, but it did not become important until Thomas McKell, founder of MacDonald Coal and Coke, built and financed the short-line Loup Creek Branch in 1894 to link Mt. Hope to the C&O mainline. In 1910 McKell's son William built the Kanawha, Glen Jean and Eastern Railroad to connect Mt. Hope to the Virginian Railway, giving it good rail access to eastern and midwest markets through both the Virginian and the C&O. Henry Huddleston Rogers financed and built the Virginian Railway after developing an interest in coal and railroads in his sixties, and with mining engineer William Page acquired coal lands in western Fayette County. To develop that property, rail service was necessary, so while keeping his plans secret from competing railroads, Norfolk and Western and the C&O, he had surveys completed for a line connecting Deepwater, West Virginia, and the east coast. Formed from the consolidation of his Deepwater and Tidewater Railways, the Virginian Railway was often considered one of the best built and most profitable railways. Because the New River was not navigable, the coal reserves of the New River coalfield would have been almost impossible to develop without railroads, which carried coal from mine to market, often in fierce rivalry, and also maintained passenger stations along their routes.