The Huckleberry.

Hard coal lies under Price Mountain and Brush Mountain, between Blacksburg and Christiansburg, and people had dug it for a century. Getting it out was the trouble. The Norfolk and Western main line ran through Cambria, at the edge of Christiansburg, miles from the mines, and in the late 1800s nobody raised the money for a branch line.

In 1902 the Virginia Anthracite Coal and Railway Company began one. Its spur ran from the Norfolk and Western at Cambria north to the company’s Merrimac Mine on Price Mountain, and on to Blacksburg under a contract with the college, then Virginia Polytechnic Institute. L. S. Randolph, head of the college’s mechanical engineering department, was in charge of the work. Crews built the single track with hand tools and horse-drawn equipment, and it took two years.

On September 15, 1904, the first passenger train made the run from Cambria to Blacksburg in about 40 minutes, with free rides for all. The first train of cadets came in six days later. The Blacksburg end of the line stood near today’s Blacksburg Library.

Cars and better roads emptied the train. By the early 1930s, the long waits meant only freshmen rode regularly, though many students still bought round-trip tickets to ship their trunks to and from Christiansburg. Passenger service fell to twice a day in the 1940s and once a day in the 1950s.

The last steam run came on July 25, 1958, and passenger service under other power ended on August 9. Freight kept the branch alive a few years more: the last freight train came into Blacksburg on June 30, 1966, and the Blacksburg station closed that summer.

The Norfolk and Western abandoned the line to Cambria in 1966. Its end gave the college room to lengthen the runway of its airport, which the federal survey of the mid-1960s shows stopping just short of the tracks.

Christiansburg carried the trail the rest of the way in pieces. In 2010 it was extended from the mall to the north side of Peppers Ferry Road, Route 114. In 2012 a section was finished from the Recreation Center to Forelmont Street, and in 2014 the two ends were joined from the south side of Route 114.

The crossing came last. In July 2015 the Virginia Department of Transportation finished a bridge for the trail over Route 114 as part of widening the road; it is the Renva Knowles Bridge, named for the donor whose major gift helped pay for it. Later phases carried the trail on to Cambria Street, along it to the trail at the Recreation Center, and to the shopping center on North Franklin Street.

The newest section was finished in May 2020: from that shopping center to Christiansburg High School on Independence Boulevard. It cost about $1.3 million, about $960,000 of it from the state’s Transportation Alternatives program.

Beside the trail, in 2013 the Town paid $2.5 million for 63 acres of farmland off Peppers Ferry Road, and in 2023 it opened there as Christiansburg Huckleberry Park.

And trains are coming back to Cambria, where the Huckleberry began. Ground was broken there in April 2025 for a passenger rail station, the first passenger service in the New River Valley since 1979.

From the Christiansburg end the trail starts at Christiansburg High School on Independence Boulevard and runs north past the shopping center on North Franklin Street to the Recreation Center. From there it crosses Peppers Ferry Road on the Renva Knowles Bridge and passes Huckleberry Park and the back of Uptown Christiansburg, the old New River Valley Mall, before it crosses the Norfolk Southern tracks on a bridge and heads north to Merrimac.

From the Recreation Center it is about 7.5 miles to the Blacksburg Library. About halfway, the parking at Hightop and Merrimac Roads serves both the trail and Coal Mining Heritage Park, on the ground of the Merrimac mine; the lot behind Uptown Christiansburg, near the cinema, is another start.

The neighborhoods on this site that the trail runs through or beside, within about a quarter mile: Clifton, Villas at Peppers Ferry, Peppers Crossing, Oak Tree, Vistavia, Suburban Hills, Hunters Ridge, Lions Gate, Cambria Crossing, Henley Place, Sleepy Hollow, Ridinger Acres and Windmill Hills.