Cleveland Line (Norfolk Southern)

For other uses, see Cleveland Line (disambiguation).

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Cleveland Line

Norfolk Southern Mixed Freight Train heads eastbound through Atwater, Ohio, along the Cleveland Line

Overview

Status

Active

Owner

Norfolk Southern

Locale

Ohio, Pennsylvania

Termini

Service

Type

Freight, Passenger

System

Operator(s)

Norfolk Southern, Amtrak

Technical

Number of tracks

Track gauge

4 ft 8+1⁄2 in (1,435 mm) standard gauge

Route map

Legend

MP.0

Chicago Line

123.6

Draw Bridge #1

over Cuyahoga River

Cleveland

[REDACTED]

122.0

Amtrak Connection

121.8

Alabama

I-90

Industrial spur

CSX Cleveland

Terminal Subdivision

120.9

Superior

SR 322

US 20

American Sugar Refining

NKP mainline

Lake Erie District

RTA Red Line

SR 10

118.2

Holton Ave.

RTA Green Line & Blue Line

117.6

US 422 / SR 8

117.1

Bessemer Ave.

116.9

CSX Short Line Subdivision

via Kinsman Connection

Randall Industrial Track

(C&MV)

Ferrous Processing

& Trading Co. Cleveland

EL branch (C&MV)

116.0

NKP branch (W&LE)

to Industrial Valley

N&SS Branch

to Marcy Yard

114.0

CSX Short Line Subdivision

via Harvard Connection

113.1

McCracken Rd

I-480

113.0

CP 112

SR 17

112.9

Maple Heights Intermodal

Maple Heights

110.9

Rockside Rd.

110.3

CP 110

N&W Connection

to W&LE Cleveland Line

109.4

Bedford

Tinker's Creek

107.4

CP 107

Valtris Specialty Chemicals

SR 8

106.5

Wheelock

105.4

Walton Hills Yard

105.1

Ledge Rd.

I-271

SR 82

Macedonia

102.9

Twinsburg, Ohio

102.7

CP 102

I-80

96.9

Hudson

Industrial spur

94.3

CP 94

W&LE Cleveland Line

SR 43

NYC line

ABC Railway

85.9

CP 86 (Ravenna)

CSX New Castle Subdivision

Conneciton to

ABC Railway

73.3

CP 73

SR 5 / SR 44

I-76

US 224

66.9

CP Alliance (Fort Wayne Line)

Fort Wayne Line

Morgan Engineering

Alliance Castings

Mahoning siding

LS&MS (NYC) line

to Minerva

US 62

Homeworth

58.0

Moult

57.0

Sandy Creek

Bayard Yard

PRR line

to Fort Wayne Line

54.4

Bayard

siding

42.7

Shale

117.6

US 30 / SR 11

This diagram:

The Cleveland Line is a railroad line owned and operated by Norfolk Southern Railway (NS), in the U.S. states of Ohio and Pennsylvania. The line runs from Rochester, Pennsylvania, to Cleveland, Ohio, along a former Pennsylvania Railroad line.

Amtrak's Capitol Limited uses the Cleveland Line between Cleveland and Alliance. Both the eastbound and westbound train are scheduled to use the line during midnight and early morning.

Routing

From Rochester, the line travels west following the Ohio River between Beaver, Pennsylvania, and Yellow Creek Ohio, where the line turns northwest towards Cleveland. Along the way, the line junctions with the Fort Wayne Line at Alliance, Ohio. At Alliance, most traffic diverges off the Fort Wayne Line and on to the Cleveland Line in order to reach the Chicago Line in Cleveland. From Alliance, the line continues northwest, going through locations such as Ravenna, Hudson, and Maple Heights until the line ends and merges with the Chicago Line in downtown Cleveland.

History

The Cleveland & Pittsburgh Railroad was chartered in 1836, due to public support in building a railroad line between Cleveland and Pittsburgh. Construction of the line was completed in 1852, with additional branch lines to Akron, Ohio, and Wheeling, West Virginia. In 1871, the C&P was leased to the Pennsylvania Railroad for a 999-year lease, thus giving the PRR access to Cleveland. During the Pennsylvania Railroad years, the line mainly hosted coal and mineral trains from the Ohio River Valley area that were bound for Cleveland. The line also hosted passenger trains between the charter railroad's namesake cities, notably The Buckeye Limited (later renamed The Clevelander) and the Steeler.

In 1968, the Pennsylvania Railroad merged with long time rival New York Central Railroad, to form Penn Central Transportation Company. The merger essentially failed, resulting in the Penn Central declaring bankruptcy by 1970.

Conrail was created in 1976 to pick up the pieces of several railroads that had fallen into bankruptcy, which largely included the Penn Central. By 1981, Conrail was turning into a profitable operation, due in part to the Staggers Rail Act of 1980. Around this time, Conrail began an extensive double tracking and upgrading of the former C&P between Alliance and Cleveland to accommodate for a planned increase in train traffic. Conrail had planned to reroute all of its Chicago bound train traffic that had used the Fort Wayne Line up to that point, opting instead to reroute that traffic to the former NYC Water Level route to the north, using the former C&P as the bridge line between the two routes. Upgrading of the line was eventually completed, allowing traffic between Pittsburgh and Chicago to use the revised route utilizing a newly installed connection track between the Fort Wayne Line and the C&P at Alliance. This connection track was later double tracked to eliminate bottlenecking traffic.

Ownership of the line was passed on to Norfolk Southern after the Conrail split between CSX Transportation and Norfolk Southern in 1999. Norfolk Southern continues to use the line as part of its Keystone Division.

References

https://www.chicagorailfan.com/amtkncle.html
Conrail (January 15, 1999). "Conrail Pittsburgh Division System Timetable No. 7" (PDF).
"Pennsylvania Railroad". The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History. Case Western Reserve University. June 20, 1997.

External links

"Conrail's Cleveland Line". thecrhs.org. Archived from the original on 2012-02-26. Retrieved 2015-09-05.
Blet659.org
title=Conrail Pittsburgh Division Track Chart (Effective 1998)

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