Norfolk and Western Railway’s Abingdon Branch began in 1887 as the Abingdon Coal and Iron Railroad, was bought by the Virginia-Carolina Railroad in 1900, extended to Damascus, and by 1915 ran 76.5 miles between Abingdon and Elkland, North Carolina, with Abingdon serving as the Virginia-Carolina Railroad’s yard and connection to the Norfolk and Western main line. After Norfolk and Western bought the Virginia-Carolina Railroad in 1916, the route became the Abingdon Branch; the track from Elkland to West Jefferson was abandoned in 1933, and the line’s popular nickname, “Virginia Creeper,” reflected both its steep, twisting mountain route and the trains’ slow speed, sometimes limited to 5 miles per hour. Crossing some of the highest and most scenic terrain of any standard gauge railroad in the United States, the 55 1/2 miles from Abingdon to West Jefferson included 108 mostly timber bridges and no tunnels. O. Winston Link later captured scenes along the route during the last days of steam operations in his photographic series A Day on the Abingdon Branch. The last train between Abingdon and West Jefferson ran on March 31, 1977, and the rail bed was later converted into the Virginia Creeper Trail through a cooperative effort of the towns of Abingdon and Damascus and the U.S. Forest Service. The branch is also closely associated with Norfolk and Western Class M locomotive 433, one of more than 100 Class M locomotives owned from 1906 to 1961. Built by American Locomotive Company Richmond Works and in service from January 1907 to July 1958, locomotive 433 came from Roanoke to Bristol in 1952 as a backup engine on the Abingdon Branch, was commonly seen in Bristol’s yard and industrial tracks, seldom ran on the branch, survived the scrapping that followed the end of steam operations there in 1957, worked at Radford until its retirement in July 1958, and was donated to the Town of Abingdon in October 1958 and moved on November 24, 1958 to the junction of the main line and the Abingdon Branch, where it remains as a reminder of the small hand-fired steam engines that labored over the remote mountain grades between Abingdon and West Jefferson.