Pittsburgh & Lake Erie Railroad HO Scale Models

The Pittsburgh and Lake Erie Railroad was incorporated on May 11, 1875, the product of William McCreery, a Pittsburgh merchant and entrepreneur who had grown frustrated with the Pennsylvania Railroad's discriminatory rate practices that were common grievances among Pittsburgh's business community at the time. After an early period of difficulty in raising capital, a new group of directors took control in 1877, including James I. Bennett and other prominent Pittsburgh figures. Construction began in earnest that same year, with the first rails laid at Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania. The line between Pittsburgh and Youngstown, Ohio was completed and opened in January 1879, initially as a lightly built single-track railroad, though its commercial success was immediate enough to finance substantial improvements in short order. The railroad's route connected Pittsburgh eastward along the Monongahela River to the steel and industrial towns of the region, then northwest along the Ohio and Beaver rivers before turning west toward Youngstown along the Mahoning River valley. A crucial extension came through the Pittsburgh, McKeesport and Youghiogheny Railroad, which the P&LE acquired under a 99-year lease in 1884, stretching the system south to Connellsville, Pennsylvania along the Youghiogheny River. The P&LE's Pittsburgh passenger terminal sat on the south bank of the Monongahela River at the foot of the Smithfield Street Bridge, a notable landmark in the city's railway geography. By 1880, William Henry Vanderbilt's Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway had invested in the P&LE, drawing it firmly into the orbit of the New York Central system, a relationship that became more formalized in 1887 and persisted for decades. The railroad earned its celebrated nickname, the "Little Giant," because despite operating a modest network of roughly 200 route miles, it carried approximately one percent of the nation's total freight tonnage, a ratio many times greater than its share of national track mileage would suggest, owing almost entirely to the enormous volume of coal, coke, iron ore, limestone, and finished steel moving to and from the Pittsburgh region's mills and furnaces. The P&LE remained a subsidiary of the New York Central and later, after the 1968 merger, of Penn Central, though it operated with considerable independence throughout. When Penn Central collapsed into bankruptcy and Conrail was assembled from its remains in 1976, the P&LE was excluded from the consolidation and regained its status as an independent operator, in part because the railroad was owed approximately $15 million and its healthy industrial traffic made it a viable standalone entity. Conrail's formation did bring the P&LE indirect access to Lake Erie connections, finally making good on the geographic promise implied by the railroad's name. The P&LE continued to serve the steel industry through the late 1970s and into the 1980s, but the catastrophic decline of American integrated steelmaking devastated its traffic base. Mill closures across the Pittsburgh and Youngstown corridors stripped away the bulk commodity movements that had defined the railroad's entire reason for being. By the early 1990s the P&LE could no longer sustain independent operations. The railroad ceased functioning as a going concern in 1992, bringing to a close a history of more than a century serving what had once been the most concentrated heavy industrial corridor in North America. Portions of its physical plant were absorbed by other operators or abandoned, and the McKees Rocks shop complex, built in 1883 to support anticipated growth, stood as one of several reminders of the railroad's industrial-era ambitions. The P&LE's legacy rests largely on the remarkable efficiency with which it moved vast tonnages over a compact network, making it one of the most productive freight railroads in American history on a per-mile basis during its peak years of operation.