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Richmond Locomotive & Machine Works advertisement, 1892
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American Locomotive Company advertisement, circa 1905
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Locomotive construction, erecting shop, circa 1910, location and company unknown
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Representatives of the Richmond Locomotive & Machine Works at the Exposition Universelle, Paris, France, 1900
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American Locomotive Company – Richmond Works, 1905, Sanborn Insurance Maps (Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, Sanborn Maps Collection)
At first, Nathan Vernon Madison thought that he’d only find enough information about the Richmond Locomotive Works for a decent article in the Journal of Industrial Archaeology. (Yes, such an organization exists, and they gathered here for a conference in 2018 and took tours throughout the region).
When Madison delved into archives and internet rabbit holes, however, he discovered that a history of rail engine manufacturing here could be gleaned from newspaper articles, orders for parts and volumes of near-forgotten surveys of industrial might.
He’s no stranger to researching topics where few others have boldly gone. Madison strides with one foot planted in the factual past and another put forward into the neo-future as expounded by pulp magazine science-fiction writers of the early- to mid-20th century. As he says of the latter, “If you’re a fan of science fiction today, you’re a fan of the pulps, even if you haven’t read any of it yet — because that’s where it all started.”
In recent years, he spotlighted aspects of the city’s industrial history, in particular about Tredegar Iron Works (1837-1957). He’s working with PBS here and Welsh documentarians with Cymru Creations about iron workers who came to this country and the parallels between Richmond’s Tredegar and its Welsh namesake, which they pronounce Truh-dee-gar. One documentary on the subject, on which he consulted, is “How the Welsh Changed the World: The Tale of the Two Tredegars.”
His most recent history concerns the little-remembered Richmond Locomotive & Machine Works, which operated here during 1887-1927. Published by the History Press/Arcadia, the book is available wherever your finer reading matter is sold. Subtitled “The Engine of the Old Dominion,” the 186-page, fully illustrated and indexed volume presents the evolution of early rail history leading to the creation of the Richmond Locomotive Works, run by a group of Richmond-based businessmen, to the 1901 absorption by the New York American Locomotive Company, aka ALCO, and the gradual demise of engine making here due to the transition from steam to diesel.
Despite the long presence in Richmond of engine manufacturing, little was written about the industry.
Richmond factories during late 19th and into the mid-20th centuries made things, from hats to barrels, shoes and ice cream churns, not to mention cigarettes. And then, as now, the city looked for a way to make a niche for itself through technological expression. These included ship building, automobile making and, more successfully, locomotive building.
While researching Tredegar, and examining the firm’s order books, Madison kept coming across requests for engine parts built there and the same people cropping up. This made him consider that within these records was a worthwhile story beyond the ironworks.
“It was kind of like, with Tredegar, how most of what is known or written about occurred during the Civil War years,” he says, although that firm wholly operated for almost a century and a quarter. He consequently lowballed his original word count for the locomotives book to History Press editors, not knowing how much he’d ultimately uncover.
With the paucity of information, the actual factory site became confused, including in the 2006 application to grant a historic designation to what became Bow-Tie Cinemas’ Movieland at Boulevard Square on what’s now North Arthur Ashe Boulevard. Those buildings were not where the big engines were built, but they housed a plant that made pieces and parts that went on them. Madison nonetheless grants full credit to the study undertaken and favors the attention for preservation of the city’s engine-building legacy, including how Movieland’s lobby displays large illustrations of Richmond-built engines and some artifacts. “It’s a public recognition of that history that simply didn’t exist before,” he observes.
Many of the images in his book come out of Madison’s personal collection, along with maps from the Library of Congress and shots from The Valentine’s photography archive, specifically of the engine-building factory at Seventh and Hospital streets, near the intersection of Hospital and Valley.
A solid remnant of the Shockoe plant is ALCO’s original 1909 office building, which is a part of today’s RECO Biotechnology, a biodiesel and soil reclamation firm. RECO is a division of Shamrock Environmental, which rehabilitated the building for potential tenants. A corridor pictured in the book resembles a railway car passageway.
The Richmond branch of ALCO made the engine that pulled the train that brought Vladimir Lenin from Swiss exile into Finland Station at St. Petersburg to ignite his Russian revolution. “The Richmond plants were filling orders of Japan, imperial Russia and Finland,” Madison says. The Finns gifted the locomotive to Russia in 1957, and the 1900 No. 293 is today on display.
A Richmond-built engine was one of several that pulled the funeral train of Franklin Roosevelt from Warm Springs, Georgia, to Washington, D.C. That’s the one exhibited today in the industrial wing of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, and it’s on the book’s cover. The engine is the 1926 Southern Railway No. 1401, 4-6-2.
During the First World War, ALCO’s Richmond plants took on the massive undertaking of converting to munitions manufacturing in Shockoe and gun powder preparation on Boulevard. “This was a complicated procedure, and they had all kinds of challenges,” Madison says. The Shockoe plant endured flooding and received bomb threats once the U.S. declared war.
In the end, Madison came across a greater amount of information than he thought available, and the History Press editors needed to hold the book closer to the word count he’d first pitched. And as can invariably occur in one of these projects, juicy little details emerged post-deadline.
One of ALCO’s chief competitors, the Baldwin Locomotive Works, located near Philadelphia, pioneered a rail engine manufacturing process. Madison describes this method as a kind of card catalog system, wherein each component had a corresponding card, complete with all its specifications. He’d not seen evidence of the Richmond works using a similar system. Then, recently, during an eBay search, he stumbled on ALCO blueprints, “which I bought, of course,” he notes, that revealed that the company utilized a similar organizational principle likely modeled after the Baldwin system. “It doesn’t change anything, but it would’ve been a great piece to include,” he says.
For all this, he’s not a “railfan,” rather a historian who pursues astounding stories.
Nathan Vernon Madison
Madison is also a scholar of popular culture, pulp magazines and science fiction, particularly in the formative years of 1926 to 1950. A major shift in the optimism of the future came when speculative fiction featured atomic bombs, “thrown around like hand grenades,” he says, without the knowledge of their destructive power or the dangers of radiation. Almost immediately after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the threat of nuclear destruction, and of fantastical mutations — like Godzilla — began to figure into the period’s science fiction. And with that, too, concern about computers becoming smarter than humans.
His first book (and revision of his Virginia Commonwealth University master’s thesis), “Anti-Foreign Imagery in American Pulps and Comic Books, 1920-1960” (McFarland, 2013), received an Eisner Award nomination for best scholarly/academic work in 2014; the following year, a four-volume encyclopedia to which he contributed, “Comics Through Time — A History of Icons, Idols, and Ideas” (ABC-CLIO, 2014), also received recognition by nomination.
Madison in 2021 contributed a monograph, “Science Fiction Magazines in the Pulp Era,” to the “Routledge Companion to the British and North American Literary Magazines.” He’s organizing and editing a collected work chronicling the history and growth of anime fandom in America, for publication in 2024.
He’s also keen to write a biography of Frank Munsey, generally credited as the godfather of the pulp magazine industry and arguably of science fiction. Munsey’s All-Story magazine first published the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs, in which appeared the adventures of John Carter from Charles City County and, later, of Mars (or Barsoom).
When not tracking down antique trains or amazing tales, Madison is in data management for the state Department of Health. “My degrees are in history, and my work is about records managing and archives — it all flows together,” he says. “The benefits of being an independent scholar is that you can go wherever you want to and focus your energy wherever the information sends you. I can switch between science fiction and Richmond industrial history.”
After all, Richmond’s motto is Sic Itur Ad Astra: Thus, you shall go to the stars.
