Lorton and Occoquan Railroad Boxcar

Here follows the inscription written on the trailside historical marker located here:

"Boxcars were acquired in much the same way as most of the Lorton and Occoquan Railroad engines – government and local railroad surplus. The boxcar you see here probably dates to the 1920s. This 40-foot long wooden car was likely obtained as a scrap car, with the metal ends added later. Beneath the car is a metal truss system that adds structural support. In the early 20th century boxcars like this were produced by hundreds of companies in the United States. Very few survive in a restored fashion today.

What do we know about the boxcars at Lorton?

With the advent of mass-produced metal boxcars, many railroad companies began scrapping their wooden boxcars. Two wooden boxcars, possibly including the one you see here, were procured from Alexandria’s Potomac Yard. In the 1930s, an 80-foot Department of Fisheries express car was purchased as surplus from the government and converted into a passenger car for prisoners. Wooden benches were installed to transport prisoners from their dormitories to their worksites throughout the complex.

The Lorton and Occoquan Railroad line represented a vital asset to the correctional complex which attempted to be as self-sustaining as possible. In addition to their use as prisoner transport, boxcars were used to bring shipments of supplies such as food and coal into the complex. They also served to take shipments of inmate-produced goods such as bricks out of the complex.

In early 2006, a Park Authority archaeologist discovered this wooden boxcar while performing a pedestrian survey of the area. The boxcar was almost completely hidden under vines and grasses that had grown up around it. Later that year the FCPA reclaimed the boxcar from the natural undergrowth and set about protecting and restoring it to its present condition.

The Lorton and Occoquan Railroad, owned by the Department of Corrections and operated by its Engineering Division, served the Lorton Reformatory (original a penal colony) between 1915 and 1977. It replaced the original cable car/pulley system in place (since 1911) to haul cars up the grueling 7% grade from the banks of the Occoquan River; during its life, the railroad hauled raw materials and inmates into the facility, and hauled finished goods out.

As the facility was being built, a ferry-barge service was instituted that hauled supplies and inmates from Washington along the Occoquan River to the site of Occoquan proper, where they were loaded onto narrow-gauge flatcars and towed by cable/stationary steam engine out of the valley and into the facility to the east. In 1915, consideration was given to electrify the line, so work began (primarily by inmates) on widening the line to standard gauge and extending the line beyond the valley and deep into the facility where it would serve the workhouse, an on-site quarry, and the reformatory building itself. Ultimately, at 4 miles long, the line would connect to the Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac Railroad on the east side of the facility via a wye.

While work continued to build the line, it was further considered that an electric line couldn't sufficiently handle the 7% grade coming out of the river valley, so the decision was made to acquire a steam engine. Reformatory officials consulted with the American Locomotive Company (ALCO) as to the proper type of steam locomotive to handle the grades and roughness (being built by inmates) of the reformatory's track, and a custom-built 2-6-2T tank-style steam locomotive was decided upon, numbered #1.

The line was completed to the reformatory building by 1920, and eventually reached the RF&P near Pohick by 1922. The line was not sturdy by any means; indeed, the reformatory's superintendent even walked across the rickety wooden bridge over the Giles Run instead of riding on the locomotive during his inspection run.

Coal, building materials, and inmates arrived by barge from Washington DC on the west end of the railroad, while waste/sewage arrived via the RF&P on the east end of the railroad (destined for dumping sites along the L&O right-of-way, and continued until after WWII), along with food and fertilizer. The railroad exported finished bricks produced by internal work programs. Locomotive #1 could only muster enough traction to haul one boxcar at a time up the 7% grade out of the Occoquan valley; on the other end, a 4% grade up from the RF&P connection limited the #1 to only two boxcars at a time. Within the facility, the railroad carried foodstuffs, laundry and scrap between buildings. And the entire operation ran with just one civilian engineer and one civilian mechanic, while inmates were "hired" to do the rest. In order to discourage the railroad being used as a means of escape by the inmates, numerous derails were placed along the line that had to be operated by hand every time a train approached; a train was always inspected at a guarded gate at each end of the railroad as well.

Locomotive #1 worked faithfully from 1919 to 1937, when it was scrapped and replaced by a Porter 0-6-0, previously used at the Washington D.C. Water Works. This locomotive tarried on until 1947, when diesels were brought on the property: a 45-ton Cooper-Bessemer engine, a 65-ton Cummings engine, and a 45-ton GE switcher. Rolling stock was acquired as surplus from other government entities.

In 1977, the decision was made to decommission the railroad, owing to the value and convenience of shipping over roadways. The equipment from the line was sold in 1980. Most of it was scrapped, except for the diesel locomotives, which now find home in Alabama on a tourist railroad.

Today, the Lorton and Occoquan Railroad is primarily paved over, but some portions remain and are visible.
These coordinates mark the exact spot where the bridge once stood. No visible remains exist.


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Here follows an excerpt from Nathaniel Lee's book, "The Iron Road of Franconia" that discusses the railroad:

You can still see traces of a little railroad in the woods near Lorton. A roadbed that once carried mighty locomotives now bears the pounding footsteps of joggers on the Cross County Trail. The Engineering Division of the District of Columbia's Department of Corrections ran the railroad later called the Lorton and Occoquan Railroad. Its only function was transportation for the District of Columbia's prison in Virginia. In 1909, Washington was running out of parcels of open space. The District of Columbia, under the encouragement of President Theodore Roosevelt, acquired 1,150 acres in Virginia to build a unique prison. It was "conceived to render to the lawbreaker committed to its keeping a different method of treatment and care, based on sane, practical ideals designed to teach the unfortunate assurance, self-respect, and a more correct version of that which means for the general betterment." In other words, this was not a prison, but a "reformatory" where a convict might learn a trade skill, be educated and pay for their food and boarding. The prisoners came to Lorton because they had displayed good behavior at their former prisons.

The District of Columbia government acquired the land through condemnation proceedings in 1910 and opened for inmates in 1916. Prisoners built their own dormitory buildings instead of cells. They used bricks the prisoners manufactured themselves on-site at the brickyard. The complex quickly gained notoriety due to Washington's response to the women's suffrage movement. In 1917, city police arrested 150 women for "obstructing traffic" while picketing for women's voting rights at the White House in Washington and sentenced them to the Lorton Reformatory. The guards mistreated the women at the reformatory, and on November 14 of that year, known as the "Night of Terror," Superintendent W. H. Whittaker met a group of 33 returning prisoners with dozens of guards who beat the women. They released the women from prison when national media outlets began to report on the story of their treatment.

When the reformatory started, there were few area roads nearby. A ferry service was the only means to transport all the reformatory's supplies and inmates. It was the idea of the first Superintendent, Mr. Whittaker, to build a railroad to connect the far-flung areas of the reformatory, the workhouse, and the brickyard together by using a railway. Teams of inmates would work on constructing the railroad that would stretch nearly five miles over extremely hilly terrain. The workers used hand tools like picks and shovels, and construction moved slowly. In 1916, Superintendent Whittaker reported, "Without this railroad it would be an almost endless job for us to haul all of our building materials to the new reformatory site with teams. I estimate that it would require from eighteen months to two years to fully complete and have practical operation of this railroad. Completing the railroad and a siding connecting to the RF&P Railroad main line near Pohick Creek was the highest priority.

Superintendent Whittaker's original idea had been to use the railroad to transport prisoners between different buildings inside the reformatory, but with the enormous amount of construction material needed to build the reformatory in the first place, any dreams of using rail exclusively for passengers ended. The superintendent ordered a powerful steam locomotive for freight operations. Engine #1 arrived by boat and immediately began pulling supplies and inmates to the many construction sites in the reformatory. In the year 1920, Superintendent Charles Foster introduced buses to take inmates from Washington to Lorton, ending the need for a ferry. However, the railroad was still important, and routine timetables were set up for transporting prisoners around the reformatory. The train itself was never a comfortable ride though, transporting up to sixty prisoners in just one or two boxcars bouncing along the hilly roadbed.

Construction on the reformatory railroad reached the Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac Railroad near Pohick Creek in 1922. Bill Koch writes that, "the line still was not completely trustworthy and the Superintendent, upon his first inspection trip, had the locomotive stopped before crossing the wooden trestle over Giles Run. He waved the engine on, after he had safely walked to the other side of the trestle." The next decade would see the most traffic ever to cross the Lorton and Occoquan Railroad tracks. Bill Koch also writes in his Lorton history that Engine #1 proved to be the "best and sturdiest engine we ever had," according to Edison Lyon, the first engineer. "The first ten years we operated without air-brakes," he recalls, "and it was only pure luck that we never killed anybody going down those grades! I had to check the sand myself, and never let anyone else set my gauges. With the tough track and steep gauges you could never trust anyone else."

With the completion of the link to the RF&P Railroad, supplies that had been coming in by boat were now coming by rail from Washington. Food for the inmates and coal for the furnaces came in from the RF&P Railroad, as did fertilizer for the prison farm. Bricks and building materials went to the construction sites. On top of all that, the railroad was still busy shuttling inmates between the sites. Compounding the problem was the fact that the engine could only pull two loaded cars up the four percent grade from the RF&P Railroad and only one loaded car up the seven percent grade from the brickyard. Still, in 1960, the line managed to carry 85 million pounds of freight, and the engines ran up six thousand miles on the odometer. The entire railroad ran a distance of less than five miles. However, the extremely hilly terrain and a security check at the gate to meet the RF&P Railroad main line outside the reformatory would cause a trip to take more than thirty minutes.

The railroad was never an escape route to Lorton, and careful precautions made sure of that. They placed switches to derail the train at random places along the line, and the engineer had to search the train for any hidden inmates before the gates leading out from the reformatory opened. The brakes and track switches were always set so an engine could never accidently roll down a hill.

The Lorton and Occoquan Railroad got rid of the steam engine in 1947 in favor of heavier diesel engines. They acquired two of these that had seen war service with the United States Army. When the railroad needed a box car or any other piece of equipment, a property agent would scour around the various governmental agencies looking for surplus equipment. When the railroads began scrapping their wooden boxcars in favor of metal boxcars, an agent from Lorton went to the Potomac Yard in Alexandria and procured two old wooden boxcars from the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.

In the year 1970, overcrowding was a large issue at the reformatory. The government proposed that it could save money by purchasing ten Army hospital train cars and parking them on a spur to use as extra dormitories for the convicts instead of building new, permanent dormitories. When the prisoners promptly trashed the new cars and gave the security staff no end of trouble, they abandoned the proposal after only a few months. Ironically, that was not the end of the idea. The proposal of using extra trailers and train cars quickly came before county government officials, only this time the trailers would house extra classrooms for children at overcrowded schools around Fairfax County.

On an average day, the Lorton and Occoquan Railroad ran three round trip passenger trains between the workhouse and the brickyard in the morning, at lunch, and at the end of work in the afternoon. The number of runs along the rest of its length varied depending upon the amount of freight needing to move. It operated five days a week with emergency runs possible on Saturday. The line had been an integral part of the reformatory to transport its everyday supplies. The District of Columbia government shut down the rail line in the year 1977, and sold off most of the equipment within two or three years. The Lorton and Occoquan Railroad had run for 72 years. One engine is still in operation on an historic railroad in West Virginia. The reformatory closed in 2001 and operates now as an arts center and water treatment facility. Today, the Gerald Connolly Cross County Trail follows the original roadbed for the train pretty closely for most of its length, and some of the rails now rest in the Lorton Museum.