Connecting Ohio’s South From 1846 till 1917

Today, I’m taking look an interesting spur route of the system that helped connect the far-flung small towns of southern Ohio. Its parent rail system, the Cincinnati, Hamilton, and Dayton (CH&D) Railroad, formed officially in 1846. John Alexander Collins, the founder, was born in 1815 over in England before coming to the US as a child in 1825. In the US he worked as an early locomotive engineer helping to spread the US’s burgeoning rail system westward to the Ohio Valley. Collins moved to Covington, KY to open and run the CH&D, in which he would remain on the line until 1872; six years before his death in Covington. The railroad was originally chartered to build from Cincinnati to Hamilton Ohio. Soon after, the route was expanded to Dayton, Ohio; a distance of 59 miles (95km). Near the end of the 19th century an organized electric spur route off the original line was put into action with a route going southwest of Dayton finally ending at the Ohio River in Ironton, OH. Decisions like these could be made back in the day for routes that would only expand the namesake of a lines name and not be profitable at all. Such for the balance of socialist and capitalist values back in the day. Finally, as the CH&D got absorbed into the Baltimore & Ohio (B&O) system; this electric spur route, just with every other electric railway in Ohio, got cut in the following decades. Leaving a line of southern Ohio small towns being impacted by the electric rail line.

Cincinnati, OH. Pop. 309,513

CH&D Depot & Freight Houses (Est. 1846)

Connections to Covington, KY (Pop. 40,837)