The Little Miami Railroad

Created by an act of the Ohio General Assembly March 11, 1836, the Little Miami Railroad Co. was organized to build a single or double-tracked railroad from Springfield, Ohio, (Clark Co.) to Cincinnati, Ohio (Hamilton Co.) via Xenia, the seat of Greene County and the narrow Little Miami River Vvalley that ended at the Ohio River east of Cincinnati. Its purpose was to bring the agricultural produce of the region to market via the Ohio River.


The second railroad chartered in Ohio, after the Mad River & Lake Erie, it was the Buckeye State's first north-south railroad. Funds were raised from the state of Ohio and by subscriptions from municipal and county governments. Lebanon, Ohio, the seat of Warren Co., was bypassed because it refused to subscribe. (See: Cincinnati, Lebanon & Northern Ry.) With subscribers often late with their payments, finances could be shaky. At one point rioting construction workers were mollified when the management gave them cows to butcher.


Construction of the Line began in 1837 from downtown Cincinnati east along the north bank of the Ohio. Below Mount Lookout, about four miles upstream, the line turned north into the Little Miami valley. There at Linwood the Little Miami located its Undercliff Yard, one of Ohio's earliest railyards. The line's earliest track, oak rails topped with strips of steel reached the village of Milford in eastern Hamilton Co., about five miles upstream from the Ohio, in December 1841.


In 1842 the line was constructed overland to its first bridging of the Little Miami at Miamitown (Clermont Co.) Its followed the east bank of the small river to Loveland (Clermont Co.) and reached Morrow (Warren Co.), where it bridged Todd's Fork where the small river entered the Little Miami, in November 1844. In 1845 the line followed the river north past Corwin, a station across the river from Waynesville (Warren Co.). At Spring Valley the river turned west and the line left the valley as it headed north to Xenia. In August 1845, now using the modern T-section rail, the Little Miami Railroad reached Xenia and established passenger service between Xenia and Cincinnati. At the city's request, the Little Miami's tracks were laid in Detroit Street, the city's main north-south thoroughfare. At Xenia construction halted. The Little Miami's construction funding.exhausted.


The Little Miami considered its route north to Springfield. The railroad's original plans called for construction of the line north along the Cincinnati-Columbus stagecoach road which followed the Little Miami River into a narrow gorge south of the village Clifton, then home to a number of water-powered mills. At Clifton, on the Greene/Clark county line, the line would turn north to Springfield about 11 miles north. James Mills had other plans. He owned a platted town site three miles west of Clifton named Yellow Springs after a local landmark, springs surrounded by reddish-orange rock in a side gorge off the Little Miami. Armed with a survey showing the route past his proposed town of Yellow Springs was 1.5 miles shorter than the Clifton route, Mills headed to Boston where he spent the fall and winter of 1845-46 arranging financing. It is said that the Little Miami RR was the first railroad west of the Alleghenies to be financed by Eastern money markets. While in Boston, Mills convinced educator Horace Mann to locate a college he was planning in Yellow Springs because it was located on a railroad line. It seems that Mills neglected to tell Mann that the line had not even been routed though Yellow Springs and vastly oversold the small frontier settlement. The Little Miami was complete when Mann opened Antioch College opened in 1847 but he was never happy with his choice.


Mills' survey and financing convinced the Little Miami's management to move its route west, cutting $90,000 from estimated construction costs. Mills dammed the creek fed by the Yellow Springs and built a hotel and spa next to the resulting pond that attracted Cincinnati' upper crust for more than a generation. Mills financing allowed the line to reach Springfield in August 1846. In 1848 the Mad River & Lake Erie line from the port of Sandusky (Erie Co.) on Lake Erie finally reached Springfield, opening the Buckeye State's first rail route between Lake Erie and the mighty Ohio. Connections east were via regular steamship service between Sandusky and Buffalo, N.Y.


On March 12, 1844, as the Little Miami inched north toward Morrow, the Columbus & Xenia Railroad was incorporated to build a line between the cities of its name. Its line was completed and opened for business in February 1850. The Little Miami and C&X quickly began cooperating. In 1850 the companies jointly built a "union" passenger terminal at the junction of their lines in Xenia south of the central business district. The cooperation paid huge dividends. In 1851 the Cleveland, Columbus & Cincinati Railway (later to be the Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati & St. Louis Railway which was better known by its trade name, "The Big Four") reached Columbus from Cleveland and chose to use the C&X and Little Miami lines to reach Cincinnati and abandoned plans to build a separate line running east and south of Xenia. In 1852 the Lakeshore Railroad, which eventually would become part of the New York Central's "water level route" from New York to Chicago, completed its line to Cleveland where it connected with the CC&C. The Little Miami was now a key part of one of this country's first transcontinental rail route, a sucession of copperating roads stretching from the East Coast to the Mississippi more than 1,000 miles west.


In 1853 the Little Miami and Columbus & Xenia formalized the arrangement by forming a partnership, the LM&C&X. With the opening of connections to Cleveland and points east via the CC&C through Columbus, the Xenia-Springfield line with its connection to Sandusky declined in importance and was known therafter as tthe Springfield Branch. The MR&LE later became part of the Big Four.


In 1859 the LM&C&X leased the Dayton, Xenia & Belpre which five years earlier had opened its 16-mile Dayton-Xenia rail line. The LM&C&X now had a direct connection to Indiana and points west west via the Dayton & Western Railroad. In 1865 the Partnership purchased the DX&B outright and entered into a lease to operate the Dayton & Western's line between Dayton and New Paris, Ohio (Preble Co.) just east of Richmond, Ind. (Wayne Co.). The LM&C&X's lease included the D&W's interest in the Richmond & Miami Railroad between New Paris and Richmond that connected it to the rapidly growing Columbus & Indiana Central Railroad that reached Indianapolis. The Little Miami and Columbus & Xenia now had a compact but highly profitable 256-mile empire in Central and Southwest Ohio.


This relationship lastest only three more years. In 1868 the partnership was dissolvedand the Little Miami leased the C&X and all of its holdings. And shortly after that everyting changed.

Over the years, the PRR Co. had invested heavily in the Little Miami system, the Pittsburgh, Fort Wanye & Chicago Railroad and the C&IC, now the Columbus, Chicago & Indiana Central. By 1868 Erie Railroad owner Jay Gould had accquired the Atlantic & Great Western, a line whose rails reached Urbana, Ohio. When Gould began talking with the CC&IC for a connection west via Urbana, Ohio. The Pennsy board of Trustees acted swiftly to protect its connections west via lines in which it had invested heavily. In 1869 the PRR leased first Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne & Chicago and then the CC&IC, both for 999 years.


The Little Miami was the last to capitulate, not wanting to give up its lucrative arrangement with the CC&C,. The LMRR threw in the towel in January 1870 after the PRR announced it had purchased the Cincinnati & Muskingum Valley which ran from Zanesville (Muskingum Co.) to Morrow. This line would be known for most of the next 100 years as the PRR's Zanesville Branch. Also announed was the PRR's intention to connect the The 161-mile C&MV with the Panhandle mainline with the immediate construction of 17-miles of track linking Zanesville and Trinway (Muskingum Co.). Faced with a well-heeled competitor who was also its major secured creditor, Little Miami's board agreed to an automaticallyrenewable 99-year lease of the company's tracks and facilities to the Pennsylvania Railroad.


The Pennsylvania's first southern connection across the Ohio River was via a Louisville & Nashville bridge connecting with Panhandle on the old Little Miami in downtown Cincinnati. In the early part of this century, the Panhandle main from Columbus to Xenia was double-tracked. After the splitting of the mainlines in Xenia, the lines were single tracked with passing sidings. Double tracks resumed on the Cincinnati main at Foster in Warren County, south of Morrow and just north of the Hamilton County line. The Xenia-Dayton-New Paris line was carried on the books as the New Paris Branch until the post USRA re-organization in 1920. It was single-tracked with passing sidings nearly the entire distance expect for less than three miles of union terminal trackages through Dayton's central business district, from Wayne Tower on the eastern edge of downtown Dayton to the diverageance of the Panhandle (PRR), Cincinnati, Hamilton & Dayton (B&O) and Big Four (NYC) at Miamitown Tower at the western end of the Great Miami River bridge. From Miamitown to Dodds, about 15 miles northwest of Dayton, the track was joinly owned by the Dayton & Western (LMRR/PRR) and the Dayton & Union (B&O).


Xenia's service facilities were greatly reduced in the early 1950s as the Cincinnati and Dayton divisions were the first to have all diesel motive power because of the grades. The Little Miami line from Xenia through Dayton to New Paris was known to railfans as "the passenger line" because nearly all St. Louis-bound varnish used the line while through freights heading to Indianapolis and points west took the old CC&IC route out of Columbus to avoid the steep grade into the Great Miami River valley on Dayton's east side. During the 1970s when this line was used by Amtrak's "National Limited," the hill between Wayne Tower and Clement Tower, just east of its crest where the B&O's North Dayton cutoff and the CL&N east hit the Panhandle mainline, was the ruling grade on that train's Washington D.C.-St. Louis run.


Springfield-Cincinnati passenger serviced, using a Brill gas-electric, ended July 21, 1953. In March 1955, Cowles-Collier Publishing ceased publication of Collier's Magazine and closed its giant rotogravature printing plant in Springfield. Loss of the revenue generated by the weekly shipments of Colliers to the south and west via Xenia and Cincinnati made the 21-mile branch a money loser. The Springfield branch was closed in 1967. Still despite the bankruptcy filing that quickly followed the 1968 PRR-NYC merger, PRR's lease of the Little Miami was extended for another 99 years. The Little Miami Railroad Co. recieved its payments from the Penn Central that supported one full time employee and a small suite of offices in Carew Tower, Cincinnati's tallest building.


Time now began running out for the Little Miami after Penn Central was folded into the Consolidated Rail Corp., Conrail, in 1974. In 1976 the lines from Cincinnati (Rendcomb Tower) to Spring Valley and Beatty to Yellow Springs. Springfield to Beatty and Arlington to New Paris in 1984 and Dayton to Arlington and Columbus to Dayton in 1986.


The oldest section of track in Cincinnati along with what maybe Ohio's oldest railroad yard, the Undercliff yard, is still in operation. In 1994 the Indiana & Ohio Rail System established its Cincinnati Terminal Railroad to operate over tracks Conrail was abandoning from near the site of the (now gone) L&N bridge past Undercliff to Rendcomb Tower, where the Cincinnati & Richmond split off the LMRR for its run up the Great Miami River and Seven Mile Creek valleys through Hamilton (Butler Co.) and Eaton (Preble Co.) in Ohio to Richmond, Ind., and connections north and west via the old GR&I and CC&IC.


The C&X from Conrail's Buckeye yard just west of Columbus in Franklin County to London, Ohio (Madison Co.) forms part of Conrail's Columbus-Springfield-Dayton-Cincinnati that will likely be operated by Norfolk Southern once Conrail's partition is ratified by the Surface transportation board. The steep mainline grade on Dayton's East Side is used as part of a spur to a General Motors Delphi (Delco) Divison plant in Kettering on the old CL&N. The Dayton & Western from the site of now-gone Miamitown Tower northwest to Trotwood is still in service to be used by a company calling itself the Northwest Railroad, now being organized as an industrial switching line.


Rails to Trails conversion projects are preserving most of the Little Miami's right-of-way. most of the 72-mile Springfield-Milford Little Miami Scenic Trail is complete. All but two of the original bridges carry the paved bike path. Funding has been earmarked for development of the Columbus-Dayton mainline to be developed as a bike path. Construction of a replica of Xenia Tower (WG) that guarded the divergence of the Cincinnati and Dayton lines and the Springfield branch at the Xenia dpeot is slated to begin later in 1997. It will sereve as a visitor's center for a "bike path hub" where three inter-city bike paths cross on the site of the Pennsylvania yards and service facilities south of downtown Xenia. Yellow Springs is planning construction of a replica of its PRR depot as a central business district visitor's center along the Little Miami Scenic Trail.



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