Looking Back | Looking Back Archive

Richmond locomotive manufacturer capitalized on national railroad boom

by Paul Levengood
for Virginia Business
September 2006

Rocked by the end of the Civil War, Richmond in 1865 seemed an unlikely incubator for business. But that summer two Richmonders opened Metropolitan Iron Works. They sought to capitalize on a national railroad boom by serving as a Southern counterpart to Northern companies that dominated the production of locomotives.

In 1882–83 the company built an impressive factory on Seventh Street, near the C&O Railway yards. But the expansion of facilities was apparently not matched by an upswing in orders, and by early 1887 company management had been forced out by unhappy investors. The head of the renamed Richmond Locomotive and Machine Works, William Trigg, embarked on an aggressive expansion of the company’s product line to include mainline locomotives, the powerful engines that pulled passenger and freight trains. Trigg’s gamble paid off, and orders flowed in from major railroads. To handle the work, new machinery was installed, and the work force grew from 425 in 1888 to 2,500 in 1900, when the factory produced more than 200 locomotives.

When Trigg left in 1898, newspaper publisher Joseph Bryan became president of the company. In 1901, the company was sold for $3 million to the American Locomotive Co. Under the new owners, the plant continued as the only Southern locomotive works of any significance until 1927, when it turned out the last of its nearly 4,500 locomotives.

One of the company’s few surviving locomotives remains a footnote to history. On Sept. 8, 1917, Lenin returned to the Russian capital of St. Petersburg. The famous scene of him arriving on a train at Finland Station is one of the iconic moments of the Russian Revolution. Preserved at the station today is the locomotive that pulled the Bolshevik leader’s train that day: No. 293, made in 1900 by Richmond Locomotive Works.

Paul Levengood is managing editor of the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography at the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond. He also serves as the program coordinator of the Reynolds Business History Center. To learn more, visit www.vahistorical.org.