all aboard!!!

Back in the early 1900s, the Town of Orange was a bustling community built largely around the ever-busy railroad. In those days, freight and passenger cars performed a carefully choreographed dance through town, stopping to let travelers disembark and entrain at a passenger depot on one side of the tracks that bisected downtown, and unloading or filling goods and supplies from freight carrying cars on the opposite side.
But the constant tide of train traffic in Orange turned in November 1908 when a fire devoured, destroyed, decimated or damaged block after block of downtown Orange, including the railroad terminal at Railroad Avenue and Church Street. Railroad officials and local government leaders acted quickly to put the wheels in motion to rebuild the terminal.
The following year, the depot which locals and visitors now know as the Orange Train Station on Short Street was built. The cost to reconstruct that essential fixture was $13,000.
For the first half of the 20th century, Orange sustained itself as a vital railroad center.
Frank Walker, in his History of Orange County, Virginia said travelers in the 1930s could choose from 11 passenger trains that regularly made stops at the Orange train station.
"Those late Depression years, plus the WWII years, saw railroading activity at its peak locally," Walker wrote. "During the early months of WWII, trains passed through Orange on the average of one every 10 minutes."
The height of train activity was in the early 1940s when more than 100 freight and passenger trains regularly chugged through Orange in any given 24-hour period. In those years, passenger trains shuttled young men off to war. Local contributions to the war effort, like parachutes made at the silk mill, lumber from local sawmills and metal work originating at Virginia Metal Products, filled freight cars bound for war materiel assembling and post-manufacturing facilities.
But by the end of World War II, rail traffic through Orange began to ebb as automobiles-now accessible to more citizens than ever before-became a viable alternative for travelers. And as roadways improved and new highways were built, industry turned to intrastate trucking to transport products and goods.
The railroad continued to operate as an artery through the county, but as the years passed, the number of trains clacking through town steadily declined.
On Feb. 1, 1965, the Town of Orange train station was the scene of a harrowing wreck when a freight train rumbled through town just after the station master had locked up for the evening. Among the cargo of the 140-car train were four cars at the tail loaded with steel bar joists. Just as the end of the train rolled past the Church Street crossing, the joists' securing straps gave way and the steel slid from the bed of the freight car, pulling it off the tracks. As one car derailed, so did the next, and the next, and joists from neighboring cars cascaded onto the ground along the tracks.
About 100 tons’ worth of steel joists were spilled throughout town; some tearing through the walls of the Short Street station. The next day, workers began repairing damaged tracks and moving steel and debris from Orange streets.
District 3 Supervisor Teel Goodwin remembered that fateful day, when the track-facing ticket window side of the train station was sheared off the building. As a young child, he rode his bike down there to take a look at the rubble.
"The front end of the station was destroyed," Goodwin remembered. "I don't know how nobody was killed."
Goodwin has other memories of the station, too, like boarding a Florida-bound passenger train in the 1960s, back when Amtrak still stopped in Orange.
In the 1970s, the very last passenger stepped from the train and into a functioning Short Street station. The doors were closed, the shades drawn for good, and the building was left to deteriorate. By the end of the decade, local officials were unable to persuade Amtrak to maintain a flag stop in the town of Orange, and the train station was shut down and boarded up.
A community and local government collaboration in 1997 sparked a major renovation project at the former railroad depot. The Town of Orange obtained the title to the property on which the station sat, collecting dust and steadily deteriorating. Largely through grant funding, the station was rehabilitated and restored at a cost of about $700,000.
Once the rebuilding and restoration effort was completed, the august old structure began a new life as a community center and in 1998 became home to the county's tourism department.
Now, the train station is a symbol of the Town of Orange. Orange Downtown Alliance Director Jeff Curtis said the building is a representation of the town's roots--and its future.
"We really are the quintessential railroad town," he said, with a history wound around an identity as a bustling crossroads. And, Curtis predicted, just as the old train station building has transformed to serve the community in another capacity than it did a century ago, the Town of Orange, too, will come full circle and find a new vitality to fit the times and benefit the townsfolk.