Coming Events
Our Annual Meeting will be held on May 17, 2008 this year at the Walkersville Southern Railroad. Walkersville, Maryland is located about 10 miles north of Frederick, MD. The meeting will start at 1PM and will go for approximately 1 to 1.5 hours.
We are planning to first meet at approximately 10am and split into two groups. One group shall continue to work on getting the machine tools operational, while the other will prepare a preliminary proposal for acquisition of the Clifton Forge shops as well as our level of participation in the case of the Lost Engines of Roanoke. Additional details of the itinerary for the weekend will be posted shortly.
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Welcome to the online headquarters of The Western Virginia Railroad Preservation Society. Centrally located in the foothills of Virginia, we are a varied organization that takes pride in the fact that it calls the great state of Virginia home.
Since our first humble beginnings in late 2003, we have grown into a working nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization which has taken a radically different path than the vast majority of nonprofits organizations around the world. Typically, a museum is formed around a piece of equipment or another type of historical artifact. It then bases itself upon that artifact, and its mission revolves and grows around it. After our encounter with the Lost Engines of Roanoke we realized that since we did not have a working facility, the traditional approach might not be the best suited for the society.
Instead of working towards acquiring additional artifacts, we wanted to establish a working facility before branching out to include additional artifacts. Over the last several years we have been working hard toward accomplishing this new goal. We have been collecting and restoring the tools and equipment necessary to be able to stabilize and repair anything that might come our way in the future.
What we have managed to acquire over the last several years though, is still far from a complete set of working tools. During this time we have also been working on acquiring a patch of land down in the Western part of Virginia in order to eventually construct a working machine shop and museum, as well as maintain a largely complete digital library of railroading history and practices. More information about our current equipment and future goals can be found on our current projects web page.
Message from the President
I want to welcome the new members who have signed up. Welcome aboard and I hope your membership will be as enjoyable as mine has been so far. We have regular meetings online the second Wednesday of every month. Starting time is 8:00 PM EDT.
We are working on a regular newsletter so if you have anything that isn't time sensitive send it to me and we will put it into the next one. We publish articles from both Railroad preservation and other types of preservation or historical areas of interest to all our members. If you would like you can send something you think is funny about railroads to share with the group. We'd all love to see it. Anything at all will do, the material doesn't have to be restricted to the western part of Virginia only.
Andrew Martin
President
TWVRPS
