DURBIN, W.Va. — It isn’t often the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources can add a new stretch of stocked trout water, but the completion of a long talked about project in Pocahontas County has opened up a new part of the headwaters of the Greenbrier River for put and take trout fishing.
“This was never one of our regular stocking locations. This has really never been stocked with trout. A little section up by Durbin is all we had access to from the road,” said Jim Hedrick who heads up the state’s hatchery programs at DNR.
Hedrick talked about the new water as we rolled along the tracks behind the hatchery truck outfitted with railroad gears between Durbin and Cass. The stretch covers 10 to 12 miles of the Greenbrier River between the two communities. The rail stocking features about 40 to 50 spots where hatchery personnel tossed in trout, including about 10 brood fish in the deepest holes.
But to get to them, anglers need to be willing to spend a little boot leather.
“There is one access in the middle of this section, but for the most part this is a walk in opportunity,” said Hedrick.
The agency annually does a series of railroad stockings on Upper Shavers Fork from Bowden to the abandoned town of Spruce, along the Buckhannon River, and on the West Fork of the Greenbrier River. The addition of the Greenbrier headwaters from Durbin to Cass is the latest and makes for a great wilderness fishing experience.
“The point of doing things like stocking a walk-in area is to create a different type of fishing opportunity. Everybody doesn’t like to fish where a lot of other anglers are or where it’s easy to access. This gives you an opportunity to walk, probably never see another angler all day, and still have an opportunity to catch some fish. A lot of anglers are attracted to that,” he explained.
The stocking would not be possible without the rebuilding of the Trout Run bridge. The old railroad bridge was wiped out in the 1985 flood and replacement had not been a high priority. In 2022, 37 years after the river rose and twisted the steel rails off the trestle, a brand new bridge took its place.
“There’s a lot of it still in the river and I don’t think it can be gotten out. That was the expensive item to replace. Lots of other places the rail was damaged, but that could be replaced with a lot less cost than the building of a brand new bridge,” Hedrick explained.
The new bridge creates additional tourist opportunities both for fishing and sightseeing. The Cass Scenic Railroad can now add new trips along the same route from Cass to Durbin and back for tourists wanting to see the backcountry of the Mountain State and learn about the roots of the state’s timber industry. The tracks were originally built to extract massive logs from the highest mountains of West Virginia to help build America during the early 20th Century. Today, the state Rail Authority maintains the tracks to support tourism.
The railroad parallels the river almost the entire way and where close enough at least one net of trout was placed.
“Wherever we can get close enough to the river to get the fish to the river safely. The further you carry them in the net, the more they are out of oxygen, so we don’t want to carry those fish too far,” Hedrick said and added the fish will fill in the gaps between the stocking spots.
“They will spread out and no matter where we stock the fish, they’re ultimately going to look for the most suitable habitat. As an angler, that’s a secret of learning how to read the water and where the fish are most likely to be staged for feeding,” he said.
One key will be river flows. The flows tend to run higher in the spring with the melting snowpack in the nearby mountains, but as fall approaches, the flows tend to get lower. Hedrick said by the fall, the water in the upper parts of the river would become too skinny for stocking.
There are two rail stockings scheduled and both of this year’s runs have been completed. The DNR also stocks on either end of the stretch from the roadway near Durbin and along the river at the Cass Railroad parking lot downstream.