Train Heist

Throughout the summer of 1861, Confederate troops brought captured locomotives and railroad cars from the Baltimore and Ohio line near Harpers Ferry to Martinsburg, W.Va. Concerned with the South's shortage of trains, Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson ordered some of this rolling stock hauled overland 40 miles down the Valley Turnpike, today's Route 11, to Strasburg, where it could begin the journey to Richmond via the Manassas Gap Railroad. Confederate Capt. Thomas Sharp's hand-picked railroad corps wrestled 14 locomotives and almost 100 cars to Strasburg. On September 16, 1861, Winchester diarist Julia Chase saw one locomotive being dragged toward Strasburg by 32 horses and wrote that it looked like an "iron monster." Some of the locomotives were damaged and sent to North Carolina for repair, but all were in Confederate service by 1863. Thirteen of the 14 locomotives brought to Strasburg were recovered after the Civil War and returned to service by the B&O. By 1854, railroads extended from Strasburg to Washington, D.C., and the town's connection to the U.S. capital and its intersection with the Valley Turnpike made Strasburg a strategic location during the Civil War.

Strasburg, Virginia · United States