Skip to content
The City of Radford, Virginia now has a new spot from which observers can watch both trains and birds.
Freight trains snake through Radford, Virginia, at least a dozen times every day. But few people in this city along the New River paid attention to the trains until town tourism director Deb Cooney suggested building a train viewing platform. An architecture class from nearby Virginia Tech took up the idea and ran with it.
Now an attractive pier jutting above the tracks draws visiting train buffs and locals of all ages. Birdwatchers, too, like the avian perspective near the treetops.
“It’s a great place to watch birds and trains,” says Cooney. “We’re putting up signs to share the significant role trains have played in our city’s history.”
The students in Virginia Tech architecture professor Kay Edge’s class produced a unique structure that far exceeded the city’s expectations. The platform, along with two attached shelters, incorporates cross-laminated timbers (CLT) that have a strength comparable to steel but half the weight. Made of layers of hardwoods glued and joined together, CLT is sometimes called the new dream material in construction.
The team used CLT composed of yellow poplar grown nearby, normally a low value wood, and coordinated the development of locally pressed CLT panels. It is the first project globally to use prefabricated, hardwood CLT modules and the first in Southeastern U.S. to use hardwood CLT.
The New River Train observation tower received recognition in the American Institute of Architects Blue Ridge Design Awards. Columns of the platform support a structure that looks like an exploded view of two halves of a boxcar. Large peepholes are randomly drilled into the 12-foot-tall and 5-inch thick CLT slabs to create dappled light and give visitors a sense of the slabs’ composition.
The viewing platform takes viewers almost above the tracks for a view of the rolling trains. The platform is behind Radford’s Glencoe Mansion Museum in western Radford and is wheelchair-accessible from Unruh Drive.
The story above first appeared in our November/ December 2021 issue.
