Central Vermont Railway HO Scale Models

The Central Vermont Railway traced its origins to the Vermont Central Railroad, which was chartered in October 1843 with the aim of building a line across the heart of Vermont. Construction began in late 1845, and the railroad opened incrementally between 1848 and 1849, eventually connecting White River Junction with Burlington on Lake Champlain. Through a series of leases and acquisitions during the mid-nineteenth century, the Vermont Central absorbed or affiliated itself with numerous smaller New England carriers, including the Vermont and Canada Railroad, which extended the network northward toward the Canadian border and ultimately toward Montreal. After years of corporate reorganization, litigation, and financial instability, the Vermont Central's successor operations were reorganized at foreclosure in 1899 and reincorporated as the Central Vermont Railway on May 1 of that year, adopting the reporting mark CV that would remain with the company throughout its subsequent history. The railway's primary function was to serve as a north-south corridor linking Montreal, Quebec, with New London, Connecticut, a distance that took trains through the Green Mountains, along portions of Lake Champlain's eastern shore, and down the Connecticut River valley through Vermont and Massachusetts. A secondary routing offered connections to Boston via a junction with the Boston and Maine Railroad at White River Junction, Vermont. The CV also operated in New York and, through its Quebec subsidiaries and affiliates, maintained a presence in the province. This international character made it a significant bridge route between Canadian and New England rail systems, handling both passenger trains and a diverse freight traffic that included agricultural products, dairy goods, manufactured goods, and interchange traffic destined for larger connecting carriers. The railway came under Canadian control when the Grand Trunk Railway purchased the bankrupt company in 1896 following a period of receivership. When the Grand Trunk itself was nationalized by the Canadian federal government and merged into Canadian National Railway in 1923, the Central Vermont became a subsidiary of CN, though it retained its own corporate identity and was operated with a degree of autonomy unusual for a subsidiary of such a large system. The CV weathered the Great Depression with difficulty, entering receivership again in December 1927 following the catastrophic flooding that struck Vermont that year, before being reorganized in 1930 under the same name. Dieselization arrived during the 1950s, with steam operations ending by 1957, and the decades that followed brought the gradual abandonment of unprofitable branch lines as highway competition intensified. Canadian National ultimately decided to divest the Central Vermont, and in 1995 the property was spun off and reconstituted as the New England Central Railroad, bringing an end to nearly a century of operation under the CV name. The legacy of the Central Vermont endures in the infrastructure and routing of the New England Central, which continues to serve much of the same corridor through Vermont and into Connecticut that the CV had developed over more than a hundred years of operation. The railway's long history of connecting Canadian and American markets made it a notable participant in the regional economy of northern New England, and it remains a subject of considerable interest among historians of northeastern railroading.