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Cincinnati, Lebanon & Northern Railway Co.

This line should not be confused with the Cincinnati Northern Railroad Co., another road that started out as a narrow guage line in western Ohio later converted to standard guage and operated as part of the New York Central System.

The Cincinnati, Lebanon & Northern has the dubious distinction of being developed as a broad gauge and narrow gauge line. The CL&N's other claim of distinction was its entrance into the heart of Cincinnati through southwestern Ohio's only railroad tunnel, a route over high ground that twice served as the Queen City's lifeline during devastating floods.

This line was organized as the Cincinnati & Lebanon during the late 1860s by business interests in Lebanon, Ohio, (Warren Co.) eager for rail transportation two decades after it had reached Cincinnati, Dayton and Xenia in neighboring counties. (The Little Miami Railroad bypassed Lebanon in the early 1840s because Lebanon's village government refused to purchase a subscription of stock) It was first conceived as a broad gauge line to connect with the broad gauge Atlantic & Great Western, then extending westward to Springfield, Ohio, (Clark Co.) and Dayton, Ohio, (Montgomery Co.) The A&GW's acquisition by Jay Gould's now standard-gauge Erie Railroad forced a pause in these plans when it was frustrated by the Pennsylvania Railroad's rapid development of its "Lines West of Pittsburgh.".

The narrow gauge boom of the 1870s rekindled interestin a rail line serving Lebanon. The company was reorganized as the Cincinnati, Lebanon & Northern Railway Co. Surveyors laid out a route from Cincinnati, Ohio, (Hamilton Co.) through Lebanon to Waynesville, Ohio, (Warren Co.) where it would connect with the Panhandle Route's Columbus to Cincinnati mainline. Finances halted construction at Dodds, Ohio, (Warren Co.), north of Lebanon but short of Waynesville.

The Line's southern terminus was on heights overlooking downtown Cincinnati. While other lines followed the Ohio river or the broader Mill Creek Valley, the CL&N entered the city via a 1,000-foot tunnel through Walnut Hill that ran into the head of the Deer Creek valley. This small valley was first bridged by a trestle but was eventually filled in.

Part of the Toledo, Cincinnati & St. Louis narrow gauge empire, the CL&N was not much of a freight carrier. It provided commuter service between Cincinnati, Lebanon and the communities between the cities. A lease of right-of-way to the standard gauge Ohio & Northeastern Railroad provided more revenue than the CL&N's scant freight traffic. Installation of ganlet track to accommodate.the Ohio & Northeastern was the first standard gauge on the CL&N.

Connection with the Toledo, Cincinnati & St. Louis narrow gauge system provided an increase in traffic in the late 1870s but the connection north through Dayton via the poorly constructed Dayton, Lebanon & Cincinnati was woefully inadequate. A rain-sodden roadbed made the first 21-mile Lebanon-Dayton run a three-day ordeal. The connection to Dayton at the top of one of the steep grades on The Panhandle's Columbus-St. Louis run proved fortuitious.. When a devastating Ohio River flood struck Cincinnati, the CL&N's Court Street Station remained High and dry. As the rising waters cut off all other routes to Cincinnati, "The Highland Route" through Lebanon to Dayton remained oveer.

When the TC&StL folded in the early 1880s, so did the DL&C. Competition from the growing network of electric interurban railroads serving Cincinnati's northern suburbs cut into passenger revenues. Revenue from the Ohio & Northeastern lease financed widening of the CL&N to standard gauge, a process completed in 1894. In 1892 its route was crossed by the locally-financed Middletown & Cincinnati Railroad, a 14-mile linking with the Pennsy's Little Miami line to Cincinnati at Middletown Junction south of Morrow.

The CL&N was leased to the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1896. In 1902 the CL&N purchased the financially-strapped Middletown & Cincinnati that ran past the American Rolling Mill Co. -- ARMCO Steel Co. -- steel mill. It was potential customer that the Pennsylvania was familiar with. A 1949 company history noted that while it was operated as a branch line to Lebanon, a line running north to Dayton was "under construction" (reconstruction?). However, the DL&C, serving the National Cash Register Co. main plant, and the DL&C's valuable terminal property in Dayton -- a LCL freight terminal along the Great Miami River levee near Dayton's Union Terminal, were not purchased by the CL&N until 1914. The CL&N was consolidated into the PRR's Pennsylvania, Ohio & Detroit Railroad Co. in 1923.

In March 1913 heavy rains in Central Ohio and Indiana almost wiped 250 miles of PRR Lines West off the map -- hundreds of miles of main- and branch line track and scores of bridges were inundated or washed out along the PRR's Cleveland & Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne & Chicago and the Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Chicago & St. Louis. The flooding did not affect the mighty Ohio. The nation's attention focused on Dayton as the hardest hit of all the affected communities. The CL&N and DL&C reprised its 1887 role in reverse. the relief flowed north from Cincinnati into Dayton on the rails of "The Highland Route."

The CL&N played its lifesaver role a third time in January 1937 when the greatest Ohio River flood in recorded history once again left Cincinnati cut off from all interstate groundtransportation except for the high and dry tracks of the CL&N's "Highland Route."

The CL&N was a branchline and the DL&C was poorly-constructed branchline at that. Motive power on the line was limited to the lighter, branch line classes. Eyewitnesses to the flow of relief supplies to Cincinnati in January 1937 report that no engine heavier than an H-10 2-8-0 consolidation was used. Maintaining the DL&C was such a headache that in the early 1950s (1952?) the tracks between Hageman and Centerville (Montgomery Co.) was the first PRR abandonment in Southwest Ohio. The line from Centerville to Dayton was abandoned by Penn Central in the early 1970s after NCR halted manufacture of mechanical cash registers and closed its massive Dayton factory complex seerved by the DL&C.

Most of the tracks operated by the CL&N in Hamilton, Warren and Butler counties are still in operation, used by the Indiana & Ohio Rail System, now a subsidiary of RailTex. The Public Utilities Commission of Ohio has refused I&O's request to reopen five miles of right-of-way along Reading Road, U.S. 42, in northern Hamilton County that would have reunited the severed ends of this line.

Construction of Interstate 71 in the early 1970s through the Deer Creek valley obliterated Southwest Ohio's only railroad tunnel.

Copyright 1996 - 2008

Last modified: November 24 2007.

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