Cleveland Line (Norfolk Southern)

For other uses, see Cleveland Line (disambiguation).

Cleveland Line
Norfolk Southern Mixed Freight Train heads eastbound through Atwater, Ohio, along the Cleveland Line
Overview
Status	Active
Owner	Norfolk Southern
Locale	Ohio, Pennsylvania
Termini	Rochester Cleveland
Service
Type	Freight, Passenger
System	NS
Operator(s)	Norfolk Southern, Amtrak
Technical
Number of tracks	2
Track gauge	4 ft 8+1⁄2 in (1,435 mm) standard gauge
Route map MP.0 Chicago Line 123.6 Draw Bridge #1 over Cuyahoga River Cleveland 122.0 Amtrak Connection 121.8 Alabama I-90 Industrial spur CSX Cleveland Terminal Subdivision 120.9 Superior SR 322 US 20 American Sugar Refining NKP mainline Lake Erie District RTA Red Line SR 10 118.2 Holton Ave. RTA Green Line & Blue Line 117.6 US 422 / SR 8 117.1 Bessemer Ave. 116.9 CSX Short Line Subdivision via Kinsman Connection Randall Industrial Track (C&MV) Ferrous Processing & Trading Co. Cleveland EL branch (C&MV) 116.0 NKP branch (W&LE) to Industrial Valley N&SS Branch to Marcy Yard 114.0 CSX Short Line Subdivision via Harvard Connection 113.1 McCracken Rd I-480 113.0 CP 112 SR 17 112.9 Maple Heights Intermodal Maple Heights 110.9 Rockside Rd. 110.3 CP 110 N&W Connection to W&LE Cleveland Line 109.4 Bedford Tinker's Creek 107.4 CP 107 Valtris Specialty Chemicals SR 8 106.5 Wheelock 105.4 Walton Hills Yard 105.1 Ledge Rd. I-271 SR 82 Macedonia 102.9 Twinsburg, Ohio 102.7 CP 102 I-80 96.9 Hudson Industrial spur 94.3 CP 94 W&LE Cleveland Line SR 43 NYC line ABC Railway 85.9 CP 86 (Ravenna) CSX New Castle Subdivision Conneciton to ABC Railway 73.3 CP 73 SR 5 / SR 44 I-76 US 224 Atwater Bolton SR 62T LS&MS Alliance Fort Wayne Line 66.9 CP Alliance (Fort Wayne Line) Fort Wayne Line Morgan Engineering Alliance Castings Mahoning siding LS&MS (NYC) line to Minerva US 62 Homeworth 58.0 Moult 57.0 Sandy Creek Bayard Yard PRR line to Fort Wayne Line 54.4 Bayard siding 42.7 Shale Yellow Creek River Line Yellow Creek Wellsville East Liverpool 117.6 US 30 / SR 11

The Cleveland Line is a railroad line owned and operated by Norfolk Southern Railway (NS), in the U.S. states of Ohio and Pennsylvania. The line runs from Rochester, Pennsylvania, to Cleveland, Ohio, along a former Pennsylvania Railroad line.

Amtrak's Capitol Limited uses the Cleveland Line between Cleveland and Alliance. Both the eastbound and westbound train are scheduled to use the line during midnight and early morning.

Routing

From Rochester, the line travels west following the Ohio River between Beaver, Pennsylvania, and Yellow Creek Ohio, where the line turns northwest towards Cleveland. Along the way, the line junctions with the Fort Wayne Line at Alliance, Ohio. At Alliance, most traffic diverges off the Fort Wayne Line and on to the Cleveland Line in order to reach the Chicago Line in Cleveland. From Alliance, the line continues northwest, going through locations such as Ravenna, Hudson, and Maple Heights until the line ends and merges with the Chicago Line in downtown Cleveland.

History

The Cleveland & Pittsburgh Railroad was chartered in 1836, due to public support in building a railroad line between Cleveland and Pittsburgh. Construction of the line was completed in 1852, with additional branch lines to Akron, Ohio, and Wheeling, West Virginia. In 1871, the C&P was leased to the Pennsylvania Railroad for a 999 year lease, thus giving the PRR access to Cleveland. During the Pennsylvania Railroad years, the line mainly hosted coal and mineral trains from the Ohio River Valley area that were bound for Cleveland. The line also hosted passenger trains between the charter railroad's namesake cities, notably The Buckeye Limited (later renamed The Clevelander) and the Steeler.

In 1968, the Pennsylvania Railroad merged with long time rival New York Central Railroad, to form Penn Central Transportation Company. The merger essentially failed, resulting in the Penn Central declaring bankruptcy by 1970.

Conrail was created in 1976 to pick up the pieces of several railroads that had fallen into bankruptcy, which largely included the Penn Central. By 1981, Conrail was turning into a profitable operation, due in part to the Staggers Rail Act of 1980. Around this time, Conrail began an extensive double tracking and upgrading of the former C&P between Alliance and Cleveland to accommodate for a planned increase in train traffic. Conrail had planned to reroute all of it's Chicago bound train traffic that had used the Fort Wayne Line up to that point, opting instead to reroute that traffic to the former NYC Water Level route to the north, using the former C&P as the bridge line between the two routes. Upgrading of the line was eventually completed, allowing traffic between Pittsburgh and Chicago to use the revised route utilizing a newly installed connection track between the Fort Wayne Line and the C&P at Alliance. This connection track was later double tracked to eliminate bottlenecking traffic.

Ownership of the line was passed on to Norfolk Southern after the Conrail split between CSX Transportation and Norfolk Southern in 1999. Norfolk Southern continues to use the line as part of its Keystone Division.

See also

• Fort Wayne Line
• List of Norfolk Southern Railway lines
• Conrail
• Pennsylvania Railroad

External links

• "Conrail's Cleveland Line". thecrhs.org. Archived from the original on 2012-02-26. Retrieved 2015-09-05.
• Blet659.org
• |title=Conrail Pittsburgh Division Track Chart (Effective 1998)