Chesapeake & Ohio Railway HO Scale Models

The Chesapeake and Ohio Railway traces its origins to the Louisa Railroad, a modest Virginia line chartered in 1836 to serve Louisa County. By 1850 that railroad had extended its reach east to Richmond and west to Charlottesville, at which point it was reorganized and renamed the Virginia Central Railroad. The Civil War left the Virginia Central in near ruin, with only a handful of miles still operable by 1865 and virtually no capital to fund reconstruction. Recovery came through the involvement of industrialist Collis Potter Huntington, who supplied the financing necessary to rebuild and extend the line westward through what is now West Virginia. The reorganized company was formally incorporated as the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway in 1869, and by 1873 it had reached the Ohio River at the newly established city of Huntington, West Virginia, which was named in the entrepreneur's honor. Financial difficulties stemming from the panic of 1873 forced the railroad into receivership in 1878, but it emerged reorganized and better positioned to capitalize on the vast coal deposits of Appalachia. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought significant expansion and traffic growth. During the 1880s the C&O completed its Peninsula Extension from Richmond to Newport News, Virginia, giving the railroad direct access to Hampton Roads, one of the East Coast's premier deep-water ports, and establishing coal export as a foundational element of the railroad's business. In 1888 the C&O built its Cincinnati Division from Huntington along the south bank of the Ohio River, connecting at Cincinnati with Midwestern rail networks. In 1910 the railroad absorbed the Chicago, Cincinnati and Louisville Railroad, which gave it a direct line diagonally across Indiana from Cincinnati to Hammond, providing access to the Chicago rail hub. By approximately 1920 the network of branch lines tapping the bituminous coalfields of West Virginia and eastern Kentucky was largely complete, and the railroad's physical configuration remained broadly stable for the remainder of its independent existence. Major shop facilities were established at Huntington, at Clifton Forge in Virginia, and at Russell, Kentucky, where the Raceland Car Shops were constructed in 1929 to handle freight car repair at a large classification yard. The C&O was generally regarded as one of the financially stronger Class I railroads in the United States through the mid-twentieth century, a reputation built largely on its dominance in coal hauling. Its passenger services, while secondary to freight in terms of corporate priority, included named trains such as the George Washington, the Sportsman, and the Pere Marquette. The railroad also became well known for its advertising mascot Chessie, a sleeping kitten introduced in 1933 by artist Guido Grünewald, which became one of the most recognizable marketing campaigns in railroad history. Passenger operations were surrendered to Amtrak at that agency's formation in 1971. In 1963 the C&O had begun a process of affiliation with the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad under the influence of financier Cyrus S. Eaton, and in 1973 the holding company Chessie System was formally established to oversee the C&O, the Baltimore and Ohio, and the Western Maryland Railway. The Chessie System holding company subsequently merged with Seaboard Coast Line Industries in 1980 to form CSX Corporation, which over the following years consolidated its rail properties into a single operating railroad, CSX Transportation, by 1987. The former C&O main line, running from the Virginia tidewater through the New River Gorge of West Virginia and onward to Cincinnati and Chicago, remains an active and heavily used corridor within the CSX network, continuing to carry bituminous coal, intermodal freight, and general merchandise traffic. Amtrak's Cardinal, operating on a tri-weekly schedule, still traverses portions of the historic C&O route through the rugged terrain of West Virginia. The reporting mark CO, once stenciled on thousands of coal hoppers and freight cars, stands today as a reminder of a railroad that played a central role in shaping the industrial economy of the central Appalachian region.