Unfortunately little remains of the first railroad built entirely for military purposes. It is ironic that just like the railroad the Civil Wars trails marker on West Street in downtown Manassas that described it has also disappeared or been moved. The screen captures below from the Historical marker database depicts it.
From the marker “Just in front of you ran the world’s first military railroad, which connected Manassas Junction and Centerville. In October 1861, after the First Battle of Manassas, the 40,000-man-strong combined Confederate force of Generals P.G.T. Beauregard and Joseph E. Johnston established winter quarters at Centerville, closer to Washington. The army needed more than 120,000 pounds of provisions for the men and 26 pounds of forage per animal daily. Supplies came here on trains to Manassas Junction, then were transferred to wagons and hauled to Centreville on the Manassas-Centreville Road. Despite efforts to “corduroy” the road (“pave” it by laying hewed logs), heavy autumn rains made it a red-clay quagmire. The exhausted horse and mule teams ate as much forage as they carried, and many animals sank so deeply in the mud they could not be extracted and were shot. As a result, the much-needed supplies accumulated on the sidings here. Johnston and his quartermaster, Major Alfred Barbour, began in November to build a railroad connecting Manassas Junction and Centreville. Soldiers did the work at first, but Johnston decided that “those duties are injurious to us by reducing our numbers” of troops from necessary patrols, drills, and equipment maintenance. He ordered Quartermaster Barbour to advertise in Richmond for railroad workers, and by mid-December, Barbour had hired slaves to cut ties while awaiting the rails that General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson had “appropriated” from the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. To speed the work, they laid ties at twice the standard interval, directly on mounded earth with no gravel underneath to stabilize them. The small bridge over Bull Run barely rose above the water. The six-mile-long railroad was completed on February 17, 1862. Ironically, just six days later, Confederate President Jefferson Davis ordered Johnston to withdraw from northern Virginia to defend Richmond.”
The route of the railroad is shown on the map below (link).
One part of the military railroad I am aware of is a short piece behind this living fence.
The picture below was shot through the bamboo. The area between the edge of the line of bamboo and the blue plastic tarp was part of the railroad. The blue tarp marks the end of a garden that is on private property.
At the base of the large kiosk is this plaque. But what does the plaque below mean- park? What park- there is no park here?
After arriving home I looked at a google satellite view of the area below. The red dot marks where the kiosk and plaque are located. But there is a road to its right that goes to nowhere, which I didn’t notice when I visited the site.
It appears that there may indeed have been a park here at one time which was subsequently closed perhaps this segment of railroad bed is longer than I thought. Below is a LiDAR image of the area. You can see a line going through the center of the image. Where the line begins at the lower left is the area of the kiosk and plaque.
On google earth when I followed the lower part of the line through to Richard Simpson Lane it emerges via a depression in the ground and onto Richard Simpson Lane to the left of a neighborhood watch sign.
The railroad is thought to have ended near this McDonald’s which sits at 5931 Fort Drive in Centreville.
On March 11, 1862, the Confederates left Centreville and Manassas and tore up as much track as possible and destroyed the trestle bridge across Bull Run. The rails used to construct the railroad were stolen from the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. The railroad petitioned the Federal government for the return of their property. After a several-month long dispute in July of 1862 the Union Army finally returned the rails to the Baltimore and Ohio. The rail bed itself was quickly obliterated by overgrowth.
There are several wartime photographs of the then partially destroyed railroad bridge crossing Bull Run. The photos descriptions indicate they were taken at Blackburn’s Ford. However, Snedon’s map indicates the crossing was on the Cub Run side of Mitchell’s Ford.
