Norfolk, VA: NS/N&W Railyard, Coal and Cargo Docks at Lamberts Point

Railyard: (Satellite)

Roundhouse: (Satellite)

Coal Dock: (Satellite)

Oil Dock: (Satellite, but I don't see a tank farm nor tank cars, so I don't think they do oil anymore)

General Cargo: (3D Satellite)

 

Tim Starr posted
Norfolk and Western RR Lambert's Point Yard and roundhouse at Norfolk VA in 1961. Part of the roundhouse still stands. (US President Railroad Commission collection)

Dave Durham posted
N&W Railway coal yards at Lambert's Point, Norfolk VA, 1915, F.J. Conway photo.

 

Stephen Preston posted
Aerial view of Lambert Point coal pier (N&W Ry.) 1943.

Randall Hampton: One more key difference back in the day, the ships were smaller, so more were needed. But most importantly, western Europe used to be much more dependent on American coal. After WWII, the USSR had to go away before eastern European coal was available to anyone on the world market.

Shannon Jefferies posted
Norfolk Southern coal trains empty here at Norfolk, VA. Then the coal is loaded onto the ships here. When the ship is full you won’t see the red paint on the hull anymore.
J.B. Rail Photog shared
Kevin Shortell: Most of the coal shipped via Lamberts Point is for export. As most of it isn't low sulfur coal, it wasn't used locally in the power plant that was demolished here a few years ago. We ironically would ship record tonnages from the docks at Lamberts Point while simultaneously bringing in Wyoming and Venezuelan coal to burn for electricity.

This is one of the few freight handling operations that

 I have seen that is as extensive in the 21st Century as it was in the 19th Century.

1948 Norfolk North and South Quads @ 1:24,000

Except for one small ground pile, this yard still uses cuts of coal cars to store most of its coal. The CSX/C&O coal dock in Newport News, VA, has switched to using ground piles instead. I presume the two long white buildings are to thaw coal in the winter time.

Satellite

WIRED posted
You're looking at the largest coal-loading station in the Northern Hemisphere. Captured by Daily Overview. The station is operated by the Norfolk Southern corporation and serves as a temporary depot for the company’s fleet of 23,000 coal cars.
Source imagery from Digital Globe
Joshua Podwoski: Isn’t it maxar technologies nowadays and not digital globe, for the image credit?
Richard Fincher: How many wagons would the equivalent amount of Thorium occupy?
Burning coal releases more radioactivity into the atmosphere than the nuclear industry ever did, even taking into account the two major nuclear accidents. Plus coal mining / coal accidents has killed more people than nuclear accidents also.
Stephan Orme: Tim Fun fact: even if our grid was 100% coal, EVs would STILL be cleaner - you can put a filter on a coal plant.
Meanwhile, our grid is ~45% carbon-free today, and renewables are taking 1-3% market share each year.
Ray Haring: The facility has 163 miles of track.

 

Michael Shufelt posted
The coal loaders are clearly evident as a trio of T6s are at the head end of yet another coal train being loaded or unloaded. Geb. 1983 Lamberts Point VA

Tom Blair: This is the East End of Lamberts Point. Those T6's are working on sorting the different classes of coal that used to come in on coal trains. Used to be a lot of work involved with that but not so much anymore. Crews on the other end of the yard gather the loads and "hump" them to the Barney Yard where they're sent down to the pier to be dumped

The coal dock must be generally busy because almost every photo I saw of it had a ship in the dock. In fact, some, like this one, have a couple of ships at the dock. The container port in the right background was built between 2005 and 2008. I wonder if it can handle the larger Panama Canal ships because there are no bridges between it and the ocean, just tunnels.

Drew browne, Aug 2017

schownizzledrizzle, Dec 2018

Tony Sissons posted
And these two massive pieces of NS equipment are still loading ships with coal.
Randall Hampton: Busier than in a typical year, because the war in Ukraine has been disruptive to the whole European energy situation.

Michael Haskell, Feb 2020

They can dump four hoppers at a time.

0:22 timelapse video

I don't think Oil Transit does oil anymore. There are some general cargo docks. Here it looks like they are exporting some locomotives.

Trevor Whited, Jul 2021

I used Google Earth to determine that whatever ships were at the non-coal docks seemed to be just parked there. In fact, the PilotOnline resource below states that the Navy berths some vessels there. To test using Google Earth as a metric of ship activity, I clicked through the images of the coal dock. Almost every image had one or two different ships there.

The lack of activity at these cargo docks explains why Norfolk Southern has leased them for 30 years to a new company that plans to spend $100m to build an infrastructure for building offshore wind farms. "Fairwinds Landing covers 111 acres and has 6,000 linear feet of waterfront infrastructure, as well as pier space with more than 30 feet of water depth. It also has deep water access and doesn’t have air draft restrictions." [VirginiaBusiness, paycount 4]

PilotOnline
They do berth Navy vessels here. The property would still have port functionality after the redevelopment.

Portsmouth Marine Terminal is being converted to a "offshore wind laydown yard." [NorfolkDevelopment] That may be why they built a new intermodal yard downstream from it.

Brochure, p10

This yard still stores the coal in railcars rather than in piles. The narrated part is 4x or 8x. The video is so long because he added the raw footage at the end. The narrated part ends at 11:09.

When the loaders were built, they were the largest self-propelled structures in the world. Each one weighs more than 5.5m pounds. Only the NASA Mobile Launcher Platforms are larger. [8:00] Actually, a wheeled excavator in Germany might be larger. 

1:43:47 video @ 2:39