The Lexington
Subdivision
From Ashland on the Ohio River, through the cliff country of eastern Kentucky, to the horse farms and bourbon warehouses of the Bluegrass — the story of the C&O's road to Louisville.
A Modest but Vital Thread
The Lexington Subdivision of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway was, for most of a century, a modest but vital thread in the fabric of eastern and central Kentucky. Running some 124 miles from Ashland, on the Ohio River, west through the rugged Appalachian Plateau to Lexington — and beyond, over trackage rights, to Louisville — it never carried the tonnage or prestige of the C&O's James River or New River main lines. Yet it carried the C&O's finest varnish — the George Washington and the F.F.V. — through some of the most scenic and least accessible country in Kentucky, and it linked the Bluegrass region's horse farms and bourbon warehouses to the coalfields, iron furnaces, and river trade of the Ohio Valley.
This site draws together material gathered by the Chesapeake & Ohio Historical Society over several decades — newsletter and magazine articles, employee timetables, track charts, valuation maps, engineering drawings, and hundreds of photographs — following the line from its improbable 1852 charter, through Collis P. Huntington's transcontinental ambitions and the golden age of steam, to its slow decline and 1985 abandonment west of Coalton.
Six Ways In
The History
From the Lexington & Big Sandy charter of 1852 to the last freight in 1985 — the full story of the line, its builders, its trains, and its people.
The Route
Every station from Ashland to Lexington with mileposts, tunnels, Corey Hill, and links to photographs taken at each point along the line.
The Timeline
Charters and panics, first trains and last trains, presidential whistle stops, floods, abandonment, and the strange afterlife of the surviving stub.
The Photographs
The C&O Historical Society photo collection, sorted by county, town, and decade — from 1910s glass plates to the Chessie era.
The Archive
Track charts, valuation maps, station drawings, side-track records, and engineering profiles — the railroad on paper, mile by mile.
The Library
Employee timetables from 1945 to 1966, forty years of Society articles and clippings, and President Truman's whistle-stop remarks at Olive Hill.
“One can travel anywhere in America and in any country in Europe and not find a place like the East Kentucky hill country… This was my country, where the hills were not high enough to be called mountains and too high to be called hills.”