If Roanoke ever had a signature sound, it was the whistle that burst forth from Old Gabriel every workday from 1883 to 2020.
Old Gabriel stood above Norfolk Southern’s East End Shops powerhouse during those years, blasting an eerie chord to signal its workers. Railroad employees clocked in, took lunch, ended lunch and clocked out via a signal heard for miles around.
These days, the whistle that looks like the Greek sea god Poseidon’s trident lies silent in storage at the Virginia Museum of Transportation. A few railroad enthusiasts hope to reestablish its call, but that process will be complicated.
Old Gabriel had a winding route from the shops where it stood to the archive where it lies. A former transportation museum board president, Will Harris, had it stored in Goshen for a couple of years and brought it back to Roanoke on Nov. 19. There, he offloaded it to Bev Fitzpatrick, the museum’s former director and a one-time board member.
“I’m from Lexington, so I never heard Gabriel blow but a few times,” Harris said. “But it’s a little piece of history that you really don’t want to see go away. You want to see it remain here, and it deserves to be here, and it deserves to be blown again.”
The old work whistle is not the original. The three-pronged object had at least two, maybe three previous incarnations, all made in-house, said Salem-based railroad historian Ken Miller. The one that exists now first sounded sometime in the 1960s, said Miller, secretary of the Norfolk & Western Historical Society.
Its distinctive sound was an inverted D-major seventh chord — a D, a high C sharp and a low F sharp — then slid down to A major, musician and former Roanoke resident Wes Chappell told The Roanoke Times in 1996.
“It starts out a little hopeful, then it gets a little dissonant, as if it’s reminding you of something, like to get up and go to work,” Chappell told the paper. “It’s got hope and despair all in one fell swoop.”
Old Gabriel didn’t sound alone. There were at least three steam whistles in the Roanoke Valley during the 1940s, including one at the old Shaffers Crossing locomotive shop, Miller said. Other horns with Gabe’s specifications sounded in 19 other towns in the World War II era.
Those whistles, and Old Gabriel, too, were air-raid sirens during the war, according to newspaper reports of the era that are part of the historical society’s archives. They were based on the same design, which at that time was one big horn, instead of the pitchfork-style that the railroad used for its final iteration.
The horn blew up twice between 1883 and 1942. A worker in 1919 built a spare for use when the original was in for repairs, according to a Norfolk and Western Magazine article in the railroad society’s archive.
The three-whistle version kept workers on time until about 2020. Then Norfolk Southern, the corporate descendant of the Norfolk and Western Railway, abandoned the East End shops. Another train business tenant has used the shops since then, but it never blasted a note from Old Gabriel.
Fitzpatrick said that he and others worried about the relic’s fate. Fitzpatrick retired from the museum in 2018, but he remained interested and discussed saving it with Harris, who was then the organization’s board president. Harris suggested that Fitzpatrick reach out to his Norfolk Southern contacts.
Fitzpatrick contacted a railroad executive, Chris Neikirk, who helped them secure Old Gabriel, gratis.
“Chris Neikirk was the man of the hour,” Fitzpatrick said. Neikirk, since retired, has moved away from Roanoke, and attempts to contact him for this story were unsuccessful.
Workers loaded it into Fitzpatrick’s old Ford Ranger pickup truck bed in 2021. He drove the silent whistle to his South Roanoke home and parked it in his garage. Soon, Harris came to get it and carried it to Goshen, where he has storage space.
Harris was among multiple museum board members who resigned in June. He cited health concerns and stress, according to published reports. Other resigning members expressed concerns about the organization’s management, the Roanoke Rambler reported.
The museum hired Roanoke law firm Gentry Locke to conduct an investigation. That firm, working with a Winchester-based accounting agency, determined there was no managerial wrongdoing and that the museum was financially healthy, the Rambler reported on Nov. 12.
Last week, Harris and Fitzpatrick worked to make sure Old Gabriel would have a secure home at the museum. The whistle made the trip back to Roanoke.
Fitzpatrick described it as smaller than it sounds. On Tuesday, Gabe took up much of his 1992 pickup’s bed space.
Fitzpatrick said that he hopes to see Old Gabriel restored to a prominent place. Norfolk Southern entrusted him with it, and officials there want to be part of any unveiling, he said.
“Our goal was to set it up and blow it at the very same times every day that it blew at the shops,” he said.
But getting the D-major seventh blast again? That will take some doing. A plan to get the whistler whistling is in its earliest stages.
Miller, the railroad historian, said he is not an engineer. “And I don’t play one on TV,” he added. He said that steam from the shops’ powerhouse blew several hundred pounds of pressure through Gabe’s pipes. Miller believes that replicating it will require a large compressor — the size of what you’d find in a locomotive — and air tanks.
“It’s not as easy as it sounds because you don’t have access to steam,” Miller said. “I honestly don’t know anybody that’s got a steam plant in the area that would be able to handle that.”
He added: “My plan was to get a couple of air tanks from … a scrap locomotive to give enough volume, and then work on the air compressor aspect separately, but I was going to consult with people who actually know this stuff. … It’s going to be a little while. It may be a year or two down the road.”
Until then, the relic lies in an archive room at the transportation museum in downtown Roanoke. Fitzpatrick drove it over on Tuesday, and a couple of workers with a cart met him to load it off the pickup truck. One of them pulled it inside, past plane and train exhibits, beyond the gift shop and into an area marked for staff members only.
The iconic whistle will remain silent but not unseen for long. Museum Director Mendy Flynn said in an email exchange that staff are rearranging some displays as they prepare for a maritime exhibit’s grand opening at the beginning of 2025.
Miller, the railroad historian, said he is not an engineer. “And I don’t play one on TV,” he added. He said that steam from the shops’ powerhouse blew several hundred pounds of pressure through Gabe’s pipes. Miller believes that replicating it will require a large compressor — the size of what you’d find in a locomotive — and air tanks.
