An avid fan of steam locomotives, he helped capture the last days of steam motive power on America's Class I railroads, notably on the Virginian Railway, and ending with the Norfolk and Western in 1960, the last major U.S. railroad to convert from steam.
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He and his wife Virginia (née Ewell) Reid lived in Norfolk near the Virginian Railway (VGN) tracks leading to Sewell's Point.
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Following a long friendship with the Assistant to the General Manager of the coal-hauling Virginian Railway, after that company's merger into the N&W in 1959, he wrote his epoch work, The Virginian Railway, which was published by Kalmbach in 1961.
The Virginian Railway is widely considered his final life's achievement.
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Saunders had most recently led the Norfolk and Western Railway through a successful expansion through acquisition and mergers including the Virginian Railway, Nickel Plate Road and Wabash Railway.
The Eccles No. 5 mine was opened in 1905; served by the Chesapeake and Ohio and the Virginian Railway, it mined West Virginia smokeless coal.
In the early twentieth century, he was the principal financial manager for the construction of the Deepwater Railway in West Virginia and the Tidewater Railway in Virginia, which were combined in 1907 to form the Virginian Railway (VGN), completed in 1909.
According to author and railroad historian H. Reid in his book The Virginian Railway (Kalmbach, 1961), it was in this mansion that Page developed the plans for the coal-hauling Virginian Railway, which was financed by industrialist Henry Huddleston Rogers and became the "Richest Little Railroad in the World" after its completion in 1909.
The circa-1885 Seaboard Passenger Station at Suffolk, Virginia was shared with the coal hauling Virginian Railway when it was built adjacently in the early 20th century.
However, according to local legend as recounted by H. Reid in The Virginian Railway (Kalmbach, 1961), it was named by Squire James Galsepy Kincaid and other locals on a rainy day in 1871 as a commentary on the standing groundwater outside the new post office along Loup Creek.