The Battle of Vienna
The Union soldiers were riding open gondola or platform cars as the train backed down the track toward Vienna. As the train rounded the curve, one of the men spotted some Confederate cavalrymen on a nearby hill. As the Ohio soldiers prepared to shoot at the horsemen, the Confederates fired their cannons from their hiding place around the curve. The Union force suffered several casualties but were spared from incurring even more by the slightly high initial cannon shots and by quickly jumping from the slow–moving train and either running into nearby woods or moving into protected positions near the cars.
Schenck ordered Lieutenant William H. Raynor to go back to the engine and have the engineer take the train out of range in the other direction. Schenck quickly followed Raynor. Raynor had to help loosen the brakes. Because the brakeman had uncoupled most of the cars, the engineer left them. He did not stop for the Union soldiers to catch up but continued all the way back to Alexandria. Schenck now had no means of communication and had to have the wounded men carried back to their camp in blankets by soldiers on foot. The regiment's medical supplies and instruments had been left on the train.
Many of the Union infantrymen took shelter behind the cars and tried to return fire against the Confederate force amid a confusion of conflicting orders. McCook reorganized many of them in the woods.The two forces were slightly out of effective musket range and few shots were taken by either side.
As darkness fell, the Union force was able to retreat and to elude Confederate cavalry pursuers in the broken terrain. The Confederate pursuit also was apparently called off early due to apprehension that the Union force might be only the advance of a larger body of troops and because the Confederate force was supposed to return to their post that night. Confederates took such supplies and equipment as were left behind and burned a passenger car and five platform cars that had been left behind. When the Union commanders at Arlington got word of the attack, they sent wagons to bring back the wounded and the dead but these did not reach the location of the fighting. The next day, a Union sympathizer picked up the bodies of six of the Ohio men and brought them into the Union camp.