(The following story by Chip Jones appeared on the Times-Dispatch website on February 2.)
DILLWYN, Va. — Annie Bryant knew something was up when her husband said he wanted to join her on an afternoon walk.
It was 1987 and Bob Bryant, then a 52-year-old marketing executive, was mulling over an early-retirement offer from his company, the railroad giant CSX Corp.
The Bryants were living in Baltimore but often talked of returning home someday to rural Virginia, where they owned a family farm in Buckingham County.
Bob Bryant, son of a railroad conductor, sometimes talked about buying a branch rail line in his home county – just a little something to do on the side.
But that always had been something to talk about in the future. The 1987 buyout moved the future to the front burner.
“Well, he never walked with me,” Annie Bryant recalled with a laugh. “That’s when I realized he was serious” about accepting the lucrative buyout, returning home, and buying a short-line railroad from CSX.
“We were coming back here to retire,” she said, motioning around the offices of Buckingham Branch Railroad, the 17-mile line the Bryants have owned for the past 15 years. “I just didn’t know we were coming back to run a railroad.”
They have run it well, taking an aging, unprofitable section of track off CSX’s hands and – with help from state grants – rebuilding it into a small, growing business that had more than $1 million in revenue last year.
They cheerfully concede they’re not making a profit but come close enough to breaking even that they can stay in business. “We consider ourselves a developing business,” Bob Bryant said, declining to give exact profit and loss figures.
The Buckingham Branch, or BB as it’s known, has been more than a business enterprise, though. It has provided low enough rates for industries in Buckingham County to send goods to distant markets, as well as preparing for new industrial clients in central Virginia.
Along the way, the BB has created some of the best-paying jobs in the county, according to county administrator Becky Carter.
“I think they started out with this more or less as a hobby, but it has grown into a good business,” she said. “They are a major asset as far as the marketing of the county.”
Their customers range from miners of kyanite – a heat-resistant stone used in a variety of products – to processors of lumber and slate cinders.
And if their recent guarded remarks are any indication, a new industry may be locating soon in Buckingham County.
“You came too early,” Annie Bryant whispered during an interview last month.
They’ve also branched out into providing other transportation services, such as serving as a rock-salt distribution center for the state highway department and contracting to some of the state’s other eight independently owned short-line railroads.
But their bread and butter is providing easy access to the original owner of their track – CSX – which provides national distribution of goods.
“Due to our rate levels, we enable local producers and businesses to reach distant markets,” Bryant said. “That’s what the rail system enables them to do. Otherwise it just wouldn’t move.”
Buckingham Branch has 14 employees working in part- or full-time capacities, including their son, Mark, who splits his time between Buckingham and Richmond. In his other life, he’s a successful painter with a studio in Fulton Hill.
Some of his surrealistic paintings adorn the walls of BB’s office in downtown Dillwyn, population 444.
“He believes, and we support that belief, that there’s more to life than drudgery in the business world,” said Bob Bryant.
Such declarations of balance in life – and responsibility in business – are among the unexpected surprises one encounters at this railroad with a heart.
Like Mark Bryant’s paintings, which take unexpected twists and turns, Buckingham Branch also is a work in progress. Inside the Dillwyn headquarters, commerce intersects with conscience, and the once-glorious past in railroading meets the hard realities of 21st-century shipping.
“We’re a recycling company,” Bob Bryant said. “Even all our key people when we started were retired railroad people.”
The couple’s efforts were recognized last year when they received the 2003 W. Thomas Rice Rail Award, an honor bestowed by the Virginians for High Speed Rail.
“The Bryants purchased the little railroad when CSX was preparing to abandon it,” said Richard L. Beadles, one of the founders of the rail advocacy group. “Since then, they have compiled an impressive record of physical improvement as well as commercial innovation.”
He noted the niche railroad company “saves our Virginia highways from yet more heavy trucks.”
The Bryants also have been active in rail history programs, operating special passenger trains for the general public.
Beadles – a former rail executive himself – said the larger railroads could learn a thing or two from the folks at BB.
“The Bryants operate their little enterprise on a common sense, no vast bureaucratic overhead basis,” he said. “They get better value for every dollar they expend.”
But the ride hasn’t always been easy.
“He always talked about having a business,” Annie Bryant said of her husband. “He talked about this railroad because he knew it was going to be abandoned.”
Working in the CSX marketing department, Bob Bryant recalled, “At least every three years, they’d make a computer run of the branch lines. The ones that lost money were the ones that got the most attention. This one wasn’t losing but a half million dollars a year, so it wasn’t one to be dealt with” as other lines were losing in the millions.
But Bryant saw an opportunity to combine his passion for railroading with CSX’s desire to shed unprofitable lines. Initially, he encountered some resistance from the railroad’s bean counters.
“The finance guys at CSX said we can’t sell it to you because you can’t survive, because the market’s not there,” he said.
Bryant asked for a chance to meet with the handful of customers using the line at the time, including what was then Westvaco Corp. The paper-products company had just opened a wood yard with a rail spur and agreed to ship on the branch line as long as Bryant stayed competitive with truckers.
Combined with the work at the Kyanite Mining Corp., Bob Bryant thought he could make a go of it.
CSX agreed to sell the line – along with a 1950s-era locomotive and an old caboose – for an undisclosed sum.
“We’ve worked hard at not revealing that number,” he said recently when asked about press reports of a $500,000 purchase price.
Starting in Dillwyn, BB runs through central Buckingham County and, after crossing the James River, ends at Bremo Bluff in Fluvanna County.
There it intersects with the CSX main line. BB also has trackage rights to operate two miles west on CSX to an interchange point at Strathmore.
“Seventeen miles didn’t sound like much,” recalled Annie Bryant. She planned to work Monday, Wednesday and Friday. “I remember thinking, ‘What am I going to do on the other days?’ Maybe I could have a card shop.”
The card shop never unfolded.
“When we got here, you never saw so much work that had to be done,” she said. “It was unreal.”
The long wooden railroad office had to be thoroughly cleaned – including removing chemicals and insecticides left behind by an earlier tenant.
Annie Bryant suffered allergic reactions as she helped her husband swab the aging building.
“I thought the smell would never get out,” she said.
Running a railroad also involved countless other tasks – from making track improvements to setting up a computer system to connect with CSX and other rail carriers.
Along with son Mark, the Bryants credit a number of former CSX employees, including engineer Jack Yowell, for helping them keep the trains running.
“We were fortunate with the employees we got,” Annie Bryant said.
All along they insisted on operating on a cash basis, taking out only short-term loans from a local bank.
Again, this was a case where smaller was better. “All the big guys have to satisfy Wall Street” with quarterly results, Bob Bryant said. “We don’t have to worry about that.”
Instead, he worried about restoring the railroad and bucking up BB’s 19 bridges that cross the streams and rivers of central Virginia.
“Our real emphasis is to upgrade the railroad to handle heavier loads,” he said.
BB has received $2.9 million in state rail preservation grants since 1993 to do the bridge and track work.
Bob Bryant praised the work of Kevin Page, manager of rail development programs for the Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation.
When BB needed to hoist some bridges to slip metal plates on support beams, Page found a crane that was going to be scrapped at Newport News Shipbuilding.
Using the low-cost crane, Bryant recalled, “We did it for what would be about a third of the cost.”
Page returns the compliment, calling BB “one of the best-equipped companies in Virginia for maintenance. It’s been fascinating to see what a mom- and-pop railroad can do.”
Perhaps the biggest obstacle for a short-line railroad is its limited number of customers – and its reliance on CSX.
“They are very vulnerable because they live and die at the mercy” of the major rail connections, as well as its handful of customers, Beadles said.
This was demonstrated last year when Westvaco closed its wood yard, which had been generating about 16 percent of BB’s revenue.
The company managed to survive the loss, though, by increasing business with Solite Corp., the cinder and crushed slate supplier, and finding business distributing rock salt for the highway department.
Then there’s that mysterious new client who seems close to rounding the bend into Dillwyn.
Bob Bryant said it would be “premature” to discuss what industry the company is recruiting. He would only say that BB is preparing “for an appropriate industrial company to build a plant . . . to give us a good traffic base.”
Buckingham Branch also is involved in talks with CSX over leasing or buying a 200-mile stretch from Doswell to Clifton Forge.
CSX officials confirmed in December they were in the early stages of seeking short-line operators to sell or lease the line.
Again, Bob Bryant declined to discuss specifics, citing a confidentiality agreement with CSX.
“We can confirm the rumor that we are one of several short lines being considered if they decide to do what they’re thinking about doing,” he said.
Buckingham Branch has plenty of experience running its own operations, and also ran a short line for poultry producers between Staunton and Harrisonburg.
For its part, CSX gives high marks to its little partner.
“I’ve been very impressed with them, and their aggressive means of marketing with a limited budget,” said Jim Bradshaw, director of industrial development for CSX in Virginia. “They work closely with CSX and we’re going to encourage new industries to locate on their sites in Buckingham County.”
Whether or not the pending deals pan out, Buckingham Branch already has made its mark on the county’s 15,800 residents.
“With economic development, they are a major asset as far as my marketing of the county,” said county administrator Carter. “Having them less than two miles from our industrial park is a marketing tool.”
Carter sounded confident that an industry requiring the BB’s services will locate someday in the county’s industrial park near the crossroads of Routes 15 and 20.
“We’re just waiting for that bird in hand – a prospect that would need that spur into the industrial park,” she said.
The Bryants, she said, “are always looking out for the best interests of the county and they’ve never asked for one red cent.”
Lately, Annie Bryant has turned over her bookkeeping and administrative duties to other members of the staff.
And Bob Bryant said he leaves the daily business decisions to general manager Steven Powell and general agent Mark Waldrop.
“I just turned 69,” Bob Bryant said, “so it’s time to think about those kinds of things, because we want a smooth transition.”
Someday, he said, ownership will pass to Mark Bryant and his sister, Lois Bryant Frank of Baltimore.
And it’s possible some of the Bryants’ four grandchildren could take the throttle of the little railroad that could.
But his son wonders whether Bob Bryant will ever fully retire.
“My father will probably be president of the railroad until he’s 100,” Mark Bryant said, “if he lives that long.”