Jan/Feb 2007

Inside Track

A look at Norfolk Southern’s Railway Company’s behind-the-scenes role in the history and economy of Hampton Roads.

By Deborah R. Huso

Jim Welch, senior general foreman of car locomotives with Norfolk Southern Railway Company, always wanted to be a history teacher when he was a kid. But at the same time, the railroad where his father worked held a certain amount of mystery and excitement for him.

“I was fascinated with the cars, the movement and the people,” he says of childhood visits to Lambert’s Point. When he graduated from high school, his dad, Robert Welch, offered him a choice. He would pay for Welch’s college education or get him a job with the railroad that employed not only his dad but his brother, grandfather, mother and two uncles as well.

“$4.30 an hour was starting pay,” Welch remembers, “and to me back then, that was like a million dollars.” So Jim Welch, a relatively slight boy in 1978, joined Norfolk Southern as a track laborer. “My boss told me I wouldn’t last a week.” He lasted four months, however, until he was laid off and then moved up to take a position as an apprentice carman.

Today, 46-year-old Welch is in charge of all car locomotive repair and budgeting from Norfolk to Crewe. “Norfolk Southern has provided a good life with steady, secure work,” he explains. “It’s provided security for my family going back to my grandfather. It’s a heritage that’s been passed on in my family.”

His older brothe Dan, who also got a job on the railroad right out of high school, presently works the job once held by his father—a piermaster at Lambert’s Point. “The man who trained me,” Dan Welch says, “my father trained him.”

The Welches’ story is not unique. In fact, if you visit the Norfolk Southern Museum, newly opened last year, at corporate headquarters in downtown Norfolk, you’ll read the stories of the Survantes, a family that worked for the railroad for five generations.

Frank Brown, assistant vice president of corporate communications at Norfolk Southern, isn’t surprised by these stories. He has worked for Norfolk Southern Corporation for 28 years himself and says loyalty to the railroad is pretty common among the company’s employees. “It’s a solid company with a 175-year history,” he explains.

Quite simply—antiquated as as people may think railroads are, they aren’t going anywhere. Railroad employees are acutely aware of this, even if the general public isn’t. In fact, Norfolk Southern occupies a very central, if often unadvertised and overlooked, place in Hampton Roads history and culture. “No matter how things go in this country,” Dan Welch points out, “you still have to keep freight moving.”

For the rest of this story, see the January/February issue of Hampton Roads Magazine, currently available on newsstands.