Hocking Valley Railway Historic District

About this property

The Hocking Valley Scenic Railway (reporting mark HVSR) is a non-profit, 501c3, volunteer-operated tourist railroad attraction that operates out of Nelsonville, Athens County, Ohio. It is also located near the popular Hocking Hills State Park in nearby Hocking County. It uses former trackage of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway, which was in turn originally Hocking Valley Railway trackage. The current operation was founded in 1972. Most of the trackage used by the railway is known as the Hocking Valley Railway Historic District, and has been placed on the National Register of Historic Places for Athens County, Ohio. The trackage was once owned by the Hocking Valley Railway, which eventually became part of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway. The HVSR began operating trains with steam locomotive 2-8-0 No. 33 built for the Lake Superior & Ishpeming in 1916, and operated over the former Monday Creek Branch to Carbon Hill. Today, the tourist trains operate along the former C&O Armitage Subdivision between Nelsonville and a point just east of Logan, Ohio. The current route's origins can be traced to April 1864, when the Mineral Railroad was chartered to build a railroad line between Columbus and Athens, a distance of about 72 miles. Little was done until 1867 when the Mineral Railroad was renamed the Columbus & Hocking Valley Railroad. The line was completed in sections between 1868 and 1870, when the first passenger train operated between the two cities on July 25, 1870. The main commodity hauled by the C&HV was coal, with clay products and related materials right behind. The C&HV eventually became part of the new Columbus, Hocking Valley and Toledo Railroad with the merger of the Columbus and Toledo Railroad and Ohio and West Virginia Railway in 1881. This new system spanned from the Lake Erie port of Toledo through Columbus to Athens and a branch to the Ohio River cities of Gallipolis and Pomeroy. In time, the CHV&T was reorganized as the Hocking Valley Railway in 1899, and existed as such until May 1930, when the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway merged the railroad into its system to create the Hocking Division. Passenger service was eventually discontinued on December 31, 1949. By this point, the coal business was fading south of Columbus, and the C&O was busy operating many trains on the Columbus-Toledo portion (which connected to the C&O's mainline through [West Virginia] with the Lake Erie). Over time, freight business was down to a single branch line local train, the "Nelsonville Turn", which finally was discontinued around 1980. By this time, the Hocking Valley Scenic Railway had been operating over seven miles of the old Monday Creek Branch to Carbon Hill from Nelsonville since 1972. The HVSR had been created by three men: Frank L. McCauley, Ted Goodman, and Jerry Ballard. It was initially to be the "Salt Creek" railroad, as they had intentions of purchasing the abandoned Detroit, Toledo and Ironton Railroad line that operated into Wellston, Ohio. During this time, they had managed to purchase three former Erie Railroad commuter coaches, piecing together two of them to be able to transport passengers. However, before details of the railroad line itself could be finalized, a scrapper had bought the line for salvage. But just in time, they were notified of the Monday Creek line and its impending scrapping. This they were able to purchase before it was too late, purchasing it from the scrapper himself. Before all of this, however, they had already purchased a steam locomotive in 1968, former Lake Superior and Ishpeming 2-8-0 No. 33 and were working on its restoration at the C&O's Yard A in Columbus.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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