Ravenworth Flag Stop (1872-1890) (Site)

These coordinates mark the exact spot where the flag stop was located. No visible remains exist. The photograph above is an exact replica of what this flag stop looked like, with the standard Pennsylvania Railroad shelter directly abutting the railroad tracks.

A railroad flag stop is a station where a train will only stop if a passenger waiting on the platform waves a flag or gives a signal to the conductor, essentially requesting the train to stop; this is typically used at lightly used stations where trains wouldn't normally stop unless someone needed to get on or off. Many stations would have a box on the platform or station containing a white or green flag that the passenger would wave at the train. If it was a staffed station, the agent or clerk would flag the train. The conductor of the train would acknowledge they had seen the flag by sounding two short whistles.


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Here follows an excerpt from "The Iron Road of Franconia" book about the railroad written by local historian Nathaniel Lee.

RAVENWORTH FLAG STOP: 1872-1890

This railroad line through Fairfax County changed its name several times, which continues to be the cause of much confusion for armchair historians. The Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac Railroad Company was chartered in 1834, and the line was finished as far as Fredericksburg by 1837. From this point, passengers bound for Washington took a coach to Aquia Creek and then took a steamboat up the river. The line then extended to join the Pennsylvania Railroad's subsidiary line, the Alexandria and Washington Railroad after the Civil War. In 1872, the name was changed to the Alexandria and Fredericksburg Railroad Company. In 1890, the Washington Southern Railway took control of the railroad through Fairfax County, and then folded into the Richmond - Washington Company as a part of the RF&P Railroad in 1920, which is what most people remember. CSX Transportation finally took over operations along the line in 1991. Confused yet? You should be. That's about six name changes over 150 years for the railroad in Fairfax County. Please read the book "The Iron Road of Franconia" for a more detailed explanation of all the changes.

On February 20, 1871, Anna Maria Fitzhugh had nineteen acres of land condemned for the railroad right-of-way. Her property would host a waiting shelter called Ravenworth. Oral history claims that the letter "S" was dropped from the name Ravensworth to differentiate this railway stop from the Ravensworth Station already in existence on the Orange and Alexandria Railroad not far away near what is today Lake Accotink in Springfield. The waiting shelter was located on the western side of the track on the Cinder Bed Road pathway found directly to the west of what is today Amberleigh Park. When local historian Nathaniel Lee walked along the right-of-way in the park, fragments of the concrete station platform were found eroding into the creek. Access to the railroad at the time was by a path leading from Back Lick Road through what is today the Loisdale Estate neighborhood.

Anna Maria Sarah Goldsborough Fitzhugh was born in 1796 to parents Charles and Elizabeth Goldsborough of Maryland. Her father was a longtime member of Congress and Governor of Maryland. Anna Maria married William Henry Fitzhugh in 1814, an only child and principal heir to the Ravensworth land grant. The name Ravensworth honors the family's ancestral estate in England, the seat of the Barons of Ravensworth. At age 38 in May of 1830, he died suddenly and unexpectedly of a stroke while visiting Anna Maria's father in Maryland. Dying without an heir since they had no children, his wife was left the Ravensworth mansion in Springfield and 11,000 acres of land covering what is today Springfield south of Braddock Road. Anna Maria passed away in 1874. The Ravensworth home survived until it was burned down by an arsonist in 1926.

The Richmond-Washington Company incorporated on September 5, 1901 as a holding company owning both the RF&P Railroad and the Washington Southern Railway. Freight traffic over the new Richmond-Washington Line increased quickly, and the train dispatchers running the show from Richmond found that the single track they had was inadequate for the number of trains they wanted to run. The number of trains allowed on a single track at the same time is severely limited because trains cannot run too close to each other without risking a collision. For this reason, they added a second track along the entire line between Richmond and Washington in a process called "double tracking." They also realigned the tracks onto the course they follow to the present day during this four-year construction project between 1903 and 1907. They eliminated or smoothed out sharp curves and reduced hills in grade, including lowering the peak of Franconia Hill underneath Franconia Road by a staggering twenty feet. You can still see this massive cut today by looking down at the railroad from Franconia Road along Fleet Drive. They put almost the entire line of track in a new location between Quantico and Alexandria, all in an effort to speed up transit times along the line.

Once the railroad had been realigned, the decision came not to relocate the Ravenworth flag stop onto the new rail line. Two factors played a role in that decision. First, the platform and rails were prone to frequent flooding from the Long Branch stream located mere feet away from the tracks. Secondly, its location on the north-south Back Lick Road doomed the station, since freight traffic was primarily coming from the west to the east on the Old Fairfax Pike, now known as Franconia Road. The railroad company wanted to focus on the stations nearby at Accotink and Franconia that sat at these important east-west crossroads. However, the important South Franconia interlock and an industrial siding also bearing the name of Ravensworth would soon come to take its place. The Ravenworth shelter had been in service for 31 years.