The crossing works like a vertical sandwich of American railroad history. At ground level, Norfolk Southern Railway operates a line to West Point, Virginia, running along its Richmond District. This lowest track was first built by the Richmond and Danville Railroad between 1886 and 1895, splitting from its main line on the north side of the James River bridge and threading along the peninsula formed by the Kanawha Canal. An older trestle from the Richmond and Alleghany Railroad, dating to the early 1880s, once ran parallel before the routes consolidated. The middle layer belongs to CSX Transportation's "S" line, formerly the main line of the Seaboard Air Line Railroad. Its trestle was built between 1897 and 1900 as part of the Richmond, Petersburg and Carolina Railroad, which the Seaboard acquired in 1898. Just north of the crossing stands Main Street Station, the handsome depot that the Seaboard and the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway once shared.

The top level tells the darkest story. The Peninsula Subdivision Trestle, a viaduct running parallel to the north bank of the James River, was built by the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway in 1901. Its purpose was to link the former Richmond and Alleghany Railroad with the C&O's Peninsula Subdivision to Newport News and its export coal piers. But the viaduct also served a more urgent function: it replaced the notoriously unstable Church Hill Tunnel. That tunnel, in use since 1873, had always been a problem -- the clay soil above it shifted and settled unpredictably. On October 2, 1925, the tunnel finally collapsed on a work crew inside. A locomotive and ten flatcars were buried along with several workers. Some bodies were recovered; others remain sealed inside the tunnel to this day. The city eventually filled and paved over both entrances, and the sealed tunnel still runs beneath Church Hill, its contents undisturbed for a century.

For over a hundred years, the Triple Crossing has drawn railroad enthusiasts to Richmond's riverfront. The spectacle of watching trains pass on three levels simultaneously was rare enough to be staged -- on several occasions, the three railroads coordinated to position trains on all three levels at the same time for photographers. A famous 1919 photograph captured exactly this arrangement, and the railroads repeated the feat in 1950. The number of good photographic angles diminished in the 1990s when Richmond built a new flood wall along the James River, blocking some of the classic vantage points. But the crossing itself remains active, carrying freight traffic for Norfolk Southern and CSX, with the middle level earmarked for the planned Southeast High Speed Rail Corridor that would eventually carry passengers between Washington and the Southeast at speeds the Seaboard Air Line's engineers never imagined.

The Triple Crossing exists because Richmond was a railroad city from its earliest industrial days. The James River falls provided water power, the Kanawha Canal connected the coast to the interior, and when railroads arrived they followed the same corridors -- competing companies laying track wherever they could squeeze a right-of-way along the river and canal. The result was a tangle of overlapping routes that, at this one particular spot, stacked three deep. The bridge carrying the lowest line across the canal was replaced in 1930 by one built by the Virginia Bridge and Iron Company. The old Dock Street connection line, built after the Civil War to link the Richmond and Danville with the Richmond and York River Railroad, was abandoned in the late 1980s. Each generation of railroading left its mark in iron and timber, and the Triple Crossing preserves them all -- a geological cross-section of American transportation history, compressed into a single vertical plane above the James River floodplain.