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This historic train station sprung up in 1858, two years after the Virgina Assembly authorized the sale of stock in the Alexandria, Loudoun and Hampshire Railroad. Plans to run trains from Northern Virginia to the coal mining country of what is now Hampshire County, West Virginia soon ran out of steam because of the Civil War.

Over the course of the war, Confederate troops demolished most of the railroad's western half, about 18 miles of track between Leesburg and Vienna. Union forces kept the eastern half open. On June 17, 1861, South Carolina troops ambushed a Union military train near the station. When a cannonball uncoupled the engine and one car, the engineer highballed back to Alexandria, leaving 180 Union troops to face about 2,000 Confederates. As the Union troops hastily retreated to Arlington, the Confederates set fire to the remaining cars.

After the war, the line continued as a branch of a series of different railroads — the Washington & Ohio; the Washington, Ohio & Western; the Southern; and the Old Dominion. The last train rolled in front of the station on August 27, 1968. But trains continue to run inside the building, which was refurbished into a museum featuring model railroads in 1978.

Text © 1998 Terry White, Drawing © 1998 Bill Harrah