Virginia Historical Society Podcast

On September 8 at noon, Rush Loving Jr., delivered a Banner Lecture entitled "The Well-Dressed Hobo: The Many Wondrous Adventures of a Man Who Loves Trains." America’s railroads have gone through a tumultuous and dramatic era during the past eighty years, and Virginia played a key role through all of it. They were the times of strong, colorful personalities, men like Virginia’s Claytor brothers, Edward Ball, the man who controlled the DuPont Trust and every evening assembled his “likkah-hound” lieutenants for rounds of bourbon and ginger ale, and W. Thomas Rice, a Northern Neck boy like Ball, who ran the Seaboard Coast Line with the iron fist of a general. There, too, were Jack Fishwick of the Norfolk and Western and Furlong Baldwin, who grew up on a plantation near Cape Charles and used an Atlantic Coast Line office car to build a banking empire. Their stories are played on a stage filled with the drama of boardroom struggles and secret deals, all in the romantic setting of railroad locomotive cabs and the o