Chesapeake and Ohio 1309
Chesapeake & Ohio Railway 1309 is a steam locomotive built in 1949 for the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway (C&O) where it pulled coal trains until retirement in 1956. It was the last steam engine built by Baldwin Locomotive Works for the North American market. In 1976, it was moved to the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Museum for static display. The engine was purchased in 2014 by the Western Maryland Scenic Railroad which began restoration with the intention of returning it to service as the Western Maryland Scenic Railroad 1309.
William Earl Dodge Stokes
In 1900, as reported in "The New York Times", Stokes bought at auction, for $25,000, the Chesapeake & Western Railroad, a bucolic venture that in an earlier incarnation, circa 1870s, was to be part of the Washington, Cincinnati & St. Louis Railroad, linking through the Shenandoah Valley at Harrisonburg, Virginia and into the central and southern coal producing areas of West Virginia and southern Ohio. The Chesapeake & Western had already been capitalized with $811,200 of common stock, $608,400 of preferred stock and $1,419,000 of first mortgage bonds. Stokes renamed it the Tidewater & West Virginia, but just a year later in 1901 renamed it the Chesapeake Western Railway. In an attempt to revive the plan to link more of east with west, Stokes pushed west and laid 13 miles of rail to Stokesville, west of Bridgewater in 1902, and east to Elkton. The Allegheny and Blue Ridge Mountains proved to be formidable obstacles to further expansion, and without serious financial backing there was no chance of true success.