There it is on your departure side… Norfolk and Western 1218. Even sitting still, it looks like it’s halfway through an argument with gravity and winning. This big black machine is a Class A steam locomotive with a wheel arrangement railroad folks call 2-6-6-4… and if that sounds like code, it kind of is: it’s basically a way of saying, “I was built to pull serious weight and still hustle.”
What makes 1218 special is simple and wild: it’s the ONLY surviving Class A the Norfolk and Western ever built… and, even more, the only surviving 2-6-6-4 steam locomotive on Earth. So you’re not just looking at a nice old train. You’re looking at the last example of a very specific kind of American muscle.
It was born right here in Roanoke in June of 1943, built at the Norfolk and Western East End Shops. World War Two was in full swing, and 1218’s first big job was hauling troop trains. Imagine the scene: steam hanging in the air, soldiers packed in cars behind it, and this locomotive doing what it was designed to do-move people and tonnage fast, reliably, and over long distances.
After the war, 1218 got reassigned to the heavy stuff: fast freight, coal drags, even hefty passenger trains. It worked stretches through West Virginia and Ohio, and later it was shifted to runs between Roanoke and Norfolk. But by 1959, steam was getting pushed aside by diesel power, and 1218 was retired.
Here’s where the story gets a little gritty. Union Carbide bought it… not to run, but to sit at a chemical plant as a stationary boiler. Because apparently even a king deserves a desk job sometimes. Two sister engines were scrapped, and 1218 survived partly because a wealthy railfan-collector, F. Nelson Blount, stepped in and brought it to his Steamtown collection in Vermont. Parts from the scrapped locomotives were even taken to keep 1218 more complete-like an organ donation, but for steam.
Then the comeback: in the 1980s, Norfolk Southern wanted steam back on the mainline for excursions, and 1218 was the perfect heavyweight. It was hauled to Alabama for restoration, guided by their steam boss Doug Karhan, and the rebuild cost about $500,000 at the time… roughly around $1.4 million today. In 1987 it fired up again, and soon it was thundering across the eastern United States. For those excursion years, it was the most powerful OPERATING steam locomotive in the world, with 114,000 pounds of tractive effort. That’s the pulling force at the coupler… the “get moving” muscle. And unlike a lot of brute-force machines, it could still run 70 miles an hour and beyond. Strong and quick-an annoying combination if you’re racing it.
By 1994, rising insurance and safety concerns helped end the program, and 1218 went quiet again. But it didn’t disappear. It returned to Roanoke, and after a final push to fulfill photographer O. Winston Link’s wish, it was cosmetically restored and placed here at the Virginia Museum of Transportation in 2003… almost exactly 60 years after it was built. And recently, it was recognized officially: it became a Virginia Historic Landmark and joined the National Register of Historic Places in 2025.
When you’re set, the Robert E. Lee Memorial is about a 6-minute walk heading east.
