The Commonwealth Railway, Inc. is a

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

Class III

short-line railroad :''Short Line is also one of the four railroads in the American version of the popular board game Monopoly, named after the Shore Fast Line, an interurban streetcar line.'' A shortline railroad is a small or mid-sized railroad company that opera ...

operating of track of a former

Norfolk, Franklin and Danville Railway The Atlantic and Danville Railway was a Class I railroad which operated in Virginia and North Carolina. The company was founded in 1882 and opened its mainline between Portsmouth, Virginia and Danville, Virginia in 1890. The Southern Railway lea ...

line from

Suffolk, Virginia Suffolk is an independent city in the Commonwealth of Virginia, and as such has no county. As of the 2020 census, the population was 94,324. It is the 9th most populous city in Virginia and the largest city in Virginia by boundary land area as ...

, to

Portsmouth, Virginia Portsmouth is an independent city in southeast Virginia and across the Elizabeth River from Norfolk. As of the 2020 census, the population was 97,915. It is part of the Hampton Roads metropolitan area. The Norfolk Naval Shipyard and Naval M ...

. The main office is in the Wilroy area of Suffolk. Commonwealth Railway is owned by Genesee & Wyoming Inc. and is a part of Norfolk Southern's "Thoroughbred Shortline Program". It interchanges with Norfolk Southern in Suffolk. An important industry on the line was the

BASF BASF Societas Europaea, SE () is a German multinational corporation, multinational chemical company and the List of largest chemical producers, largest chemical producer in the world. Its headquarters is located in Ludwigshafen, Germany. The ...

Chemical plant in the West Norfolk area of Portsmouth. The plant was usually switched by locomotive #444, a

GP16 The EMD GP16 are a series of rebuilt diesel-electric locomotives, a result of a remanufacturing program initiated by the Seaboard Coast Line Railroad (SCL) in an effort to spare the cost of purchasing new motive power in the late 1970s. This in ...

class locomotive rebuilt by

Seaboard Coast Line Railroad The Seaboard Coast Line Railroad was a Class I railroad company operating in the Southeastern United States beginning in 1967. Its passenger operations were taken over by Amtrak in 1971. Eventually, the railroad was merged with its affiliate lin ...

in the early 1980s. The main locomotive was #517, a

CF7 The Santa Fe CF7 is an EMD F-unit railroad locomotive that has had its streamlined carbody removed and replaced with a custom-made, "general purpose" body in order to adapt the unit for switcher, switching duty. All of the conversions were perform ...

rebuild of an

EMD F7 The EMD F7 is a model of diesel-electric locomotive produced between February 1949 and December 1953 by the Electro-Motive Division of General Motors (EMD) and General Motors Diesel (GMD). Although originally promoted by EMD as a freight-h ...

performed by the

Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway , often referred to as the Santa Fe or AT&SF, was one of the larger railroads in the United States. The railroad was chartered in February 1859 to serve the cities of Atchison, Kansas, Atchison and Top ...

in the 1970s. The BASF plant closed in 2007 and was subsequently demolished. A small chemical company remains on the site. Another important industry is ''APM Terminals'', which is a modern shipping container port in Portsmouth along the Elizabeth River. This port was leased by

Maersk (), also known simply as Maersk (), is a Danish shipping company, active in ocean and inland freight transportation and associated services, such as supply chain management and port operation. Maersk was the largest container shipping line a ...

to the

Virginia Port Authority The Virginia Port Authority (VPA) is an autonomous agency ( political subdivision) of the Commonwealth of Virginia that owns The Port of Virginia, a group of facilities with their activity centered on the harbor of Hampton Roads, Virginia. The pri ...

in late 2010. Commonwealth Railway is the only rail line to access the port. Another port is planned for Craney Island; however, as of 2020 the port is still in the planning stage and has not been constructed. With the opening of this new container port, two

EMD SW1500 The EMD SW1500 is a Diesel-electric locomotive intended for switching service and built by General Motors' Electro-Motive Division from 1966 to 1974. The SW1500 replaced the SW1200 in the EMD product line. Many railroads regularly used SW1500s ...

switch engines were added to the roster. To handle the container traffic to and from the port, the Commonwealth Railway line through the city of Portsmouth has been realigned down the

median In statistics and probability theory, the median is the value separating the higher half from the lower half of a data sample, a population, or a probability distribution. For a data set, it may be thought of as "the middle" value. The basic fe ...

s of

I-664 Interstate 664 (I-664) is an auxiliary Interstate Highway in the US state of Virginia. The Interstate runs from Interstate 64 in Virginia, I-64 and Interstate 264 (Virginia), I-264 in Chesapeake, Virginia, Chesapeake north to I-64 in Hamp ...

and SR 164, at a cost of $60 million. A small marshaling yard was built in the Baileytown area of Suffolk. Double-stack container service started in December 2010. A second phase, paid for by $9 million in federal stimulus funding, will further improve port access and is expected to be completed in September 2011. The Commonwealth Railway had two GP20 locomotives numbered 2090 and 2091 which were sold in 2019 to Larry's Truck & Electric (LTEX) in McDonald, Ohio. By 2020 the Commonwealth Railway operated only one locomotive, an EMD GP15-1 numbered 1424, leased from LTEX. The company's remaining EMD SW1500, No. 1551, is leased to the International Paper Company in Franklin, Virginia. Image:CWRY444GP16.JPG, Rail Link Inc. #444, a GP16 rebuild, was used for switching along the Commonwealth Railway in

. It has since been transferred to the

First Coast Railroad The First Coast Railroad is a class III railroad operating in Florida and Georgia, owned by Genesee & Wyoming. The name is derived from its area of operations around the First Coast of Florida. The FCRD was founded in April 2005 to lease 32 mile ...

, another G&W property, in Fernandina Beach, Florida. Image:Suffolk Va.JPG, Locomotive #517 runs past the site of the new yard at

after switching the

plant. Today it sits behind a warehouse in the Wilroy industrial park, out of service and awaiting a scrapper to cut it up. Image:CWRY 1552 WJ Grimes.JPG, Commonwealth Railway #1552 an SW1500 parked at Wilroy in

. It has been transferred to the G&W's

Georgia Central Railway The Georgia Central Railway operates about of former Seaboard Coast Line track from Macon, Georgia through Dublin, Georgia and Vidalia, Georgia to Savannah, Georgia. It also operates about of trackage between Savannah and Riceboro, Georgia, swi ...

in Lyons, Georgia.Georgia Central Railway Image:APM Terminals WJ Grimes.JPG, Maersk's APM Terminals in

, at night.

References

External links

Commonwealth Railway official webpage - Genesee and Wyoming website

Pictures of CWRY Locomotives

{{DEFAULTSORT:Commonwealth Railway Virginia railroads Genesee & Wyoming Spin-offs of the Norfolk Southern Railway 1989 establishments in Virginia