24/7 Trauma and Biohazard Cleanup in Victoria, VA

Victoria is an incorporated town in Lunenburg County, Virginia — not Victoria in any other state — and with 1,734 residents in the 2020 census it is the largest town in Lunenburg County.

Victoria was born as a railroad town: it was laid out in 1906 as a planned community during construction of the Tidewater Railway, the line that became the Virginian Railway, and it was incorporated in April 1909.

The town is believed to have been named for Queen Victoria by railroad builder Henry Huttleston Rogers, and it sat roughly halfway between Roanoke and the port at Norfolk on the coal-hauling Virginian Railway.

Before the railroad arrived, the site of Victoria was mostly tobacco farmland and woodland in a county that canals, turnpikes, and earlier railroads had largely bypassed.

Victoria became a major division point on the Virginian, with railroad shops, a roundhouse, a turntable, and division offices that anchored the town's economy for half a century.

The end of steam railroading hit Victoria hard, and its railroad shops closed after the Virginian merged into Norfolk Southern in 1959, forcing the town to rebuild its economy beyond the railroad.

A restored Virginian Railway caboose, Caboose 342, was placed on public display in Victoria on December 22, 2004, on a short stretch of relaid track, and the initials of founders Henry H. Rogers and William Nelson Page are engraved in tribute at the site.

The town's railroad heritage is preserved at Victoria Railroad Park, and Lunenburg County — formed in 1746 and named for a title of King George II — had 11,936 residents in the 2020 census.

Victoria covers about 2.8 square miles, giving it a population density of roughly 616 people per square mile in 2020.

Unlike Lunenburg, the county seat community a few miles west, Victoria is one of only two incorporated towns in Lunenburg County, along with Kenbridge.