A C&O H8 accelerates underneath the highway bridge at Stone Cliff, W.Va., after picking up a few more loads at Thurmond to round out the train size to 125 cars of the New River "smokeless" coal. The Stone Cliff Bridge, which carries the Thurmond-McKendree Road (County Route 25) across the New River, was built about 50 years after the mining community of Stone Cliff was established in the late 1870s, following the completion of the C&O's line through the New River Gorge. In 1920, when the coal business was booming, the town's population was 840. Today, Stone Cliff is simply one of the dozens of deserted
ghost towns of the New River Gorge.
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