One Hundred Sixty-Four Years
From a charter signed before the Civil War to the last trash train of 2016 — the life of the line, year by year.
Origins & False Starts
The Lexington & Big Sandy is chartered
The Kentucky legislature charters the Lexington & Big Sandy Railroad to build east from Lexington to the Big Sandy River near Catlettsburg. The Panic of 1857 kills the scheme before track is laid. A separate enterprise under a different 1852 charter begins building from Ashland toward the iron country at Mt. Savage.
First loads through Williams Creek Tunnel
Begun in 1853, the tunnel near Denton passes its first loads — iron from the Mt. Savage furnace bound for the Ohio River at Ashland. The 21-mile line is essentially complete by 1859, decades before the C&O arrives.
The Elizabethtown, Lexington & Big Sandy
The EL&BS is incorporated, acquiring the defunct Lexington & Big Sandy's rights in 1871. By 1872 it has laid roughly 33 miles east from Lexington to Mt. Sterling and built stone piers for a Big Sandy bridge — piers that will stand bare for eight years when another depression stops the work.
The Ashland Coal & Iron Railway
The old Ashland–Mt. Savage line takes the name history remembers: the AC&I, run by the Means brothers of Ashland for the coal mines at Coalton and the iron furnaces of Carter County.
Huntington Builds the Line
Building by mail
Collis P. Huntington drives construction from his New York office by correspondence — pressing contractors through the winter on the stubborn Triplett and Means tunnels, capping the new Lexington depot at $5,000, and striking his trackage deal with the Means brothers' AC&I rather than building a duplicate line.
The first C&O train reaches Lexington
Track gangs close the gap and through service begins — Ashland to Lexington via Catlettsburg's long curving trestle, the AC&I's rails to Denton, and the new EL&BS line over Corey Hill.
Very nearly coast to coast
Huntington's Newport News & Mississippi Valley holding company briefly ties together nearly 1,900 miles from Chesapeake Bay toward New Orleans — with the Lexington line as a link in the chain. The dream dies in the 1888 receivership of the western connections, though the C&O itself emerges intact.
The road to Louisville
Trackage rights over the Louisville & Nashville west of Lexington are formalized, fixing the pattern of C&O's 94-mile Louisville extension for the rest of the line's life. The Christiansburg–Shelbyville cutoff of 1896 shortens the route by ten miles.
The Golden Brick Trail & the Golden Age
The fire-brick boom
Harbison-Walker opens at Olive Hill (1901), Kentucky Fire Brick at Haldeman (1903), and by 1913 the Louisville Fire Brick Works at Grahn and General Refractories at Hitchins join them — eight plants in the district, eventually shipping some fifty carloads of brick a day over the line.
Head-on near Winchester
Wrong orders put a westbound through freight and an eastbound local on the same track before dawn. Both engineers jump and survive; nineteen-year-old fireman George C. Sheehan of Owingsville is killed — a story preserved in his family for sixty years. The same year, Winchester's Georgian Revival Union Depot opens.
Lexington Union Station opens
An imposing station shared with the L&N and Lexington & Eastern replaces the modest 1882 depot. C&O will run as many as eight trains a day in and out of it.
Presidents at the platform
Taft (1908), Theodore Roosevelt (1912), and Wilson (1916) speak at Winchester's depot; Franklin Roosevelt sleeps through his 1940 stop; and Harry Truman whistle-stops at Winchester, Mt. Sterling, and Olive Hill in his come-from-behind 1948 campaign.
The AC&I becomes C&O
The C&O leases the Ashland Coal & Iron in 1925 and absorbs it outright in 1933 — the old 1850s railroad becoming, simply, the first 21 miles of the Lexington Subdivision.
Triplett Tunnel abandoned
The soft shale roof that had plagued the tunnel since Huntington's day finally wins: the bore near Soldier is bypassed with an open cut — vindicating, a half-century late, the engineers Huntington overruled.
A secret passenger
Fearing the bombing of Washington, the government seals the Declaration of Independence in a Pullman car and ships it secretly over the C&O through this line to Louisville, bound for the Fort Knox gold depository for the duration of the war. Employee Timetable No. 133 (1945) shows the wartime railroad at its operational peak: three passenger and three freight schedules each way.
The best power the line ever had
K-4 Kanawhas, fitted with steam heat lines, take over the George Washington's Ashland–Lexington leg while rebuilt ex-RF&P F-20 Pacifics handle the F.F.V. — for its final steam years, a secondary line with some of the best-equipped passenger power on the system.
Diesels & Decline
Dieselization
Diesels take over the Lexington Division. That July, Captain Otho McFarland — a C&O conductor since the 1890s — gives the highball at Ashland for the last time and retires.
Jesse Stuart rides Train 21
The Kentucky author and his wife ride the George Washington's Kentucky section from Ashland to Louisville — $19.48 round trip — and he writes his loving portrait of the "Cliff Country" for the C&O's TRACKS magazine.
Last train from Union Station
The eastbound George Washington makes the final departure from Lexington's 1907 Union Station, by then far too large for two trains a day. Passenger business moves to a waiting room in the Water Street freight station.
Changes at both ends
In Louisville, C&O leaves riverfront Central Station for L&N's Union Station on June 1. At Coalton, the Mansbach family incorporates Kentucky Electric Steel and begins building a minimill on the old AC&I ground — the industry that will keep the east end of the line alive.
Timetable No. 153
One passenger schedule remains in each direction — Trains 21 and 22, the last vestige of the George Washington's Kentucky sections — and the elaborate signal and siding instructions of 1947 have shrunk to a single line of operating rules.
The last passenger train
Amtrak's creation ends Trains 21 and 22 for good. The Delaware Avenue depot in Lexington, opened December 17, 1968 after urban renewal forced the passenger tracks out of downtown, closes after barely twenty-nine months of use.
Abandonment
The west end goes first
C&O posts notice to abandon Chilesburg–Winchester in 1978; through service between Lexington and Winchester ends in April 1981 and the rails come up that fall. Winchester's depot is demolished without notice on July 25, 1981 — mourned by a mock funeral procession up Main Street. The last Lexington stub, serving a fertilizer plant at Chilesburg, goes in 1983.
Chessie files to abandon
With carloads down more than 98 percent from 1974 — 17,087 to just 324 — Chessie System asks the ICC to abandon 92.94 miles from Coalton to Winchester. A citizens' committee seeks a buyer; TransKentucky offers to lease the Winchester–Mt. Sterling end for a dollar a year. Chessie declines.
The end of the through route
The ICC approves abandonment on March 19; Chessie lifts the Coalton–Winchester line on or about May 13, 1985. Olive Hill, Morehead, and Mt. Sterling lose rail service for the first time in over a century. Only the Ashland–Coalton stub — the old AC&I — survives. In June 1986, Addington Inc. buys 2.48 miles of the right-of-way for a coal facility.
Afterlife
The trash-train years
The Big Run Landfill in Boyd County turns the surviving stub into a conveyor for out-of-state waste — a three-track yard at Coalton (2005), enlarged tunnels, and 3,500 tons a day at the peak, 90 percent of it from New York and New Jersey. After a 2013 landslide, odor complaints for miles around, a $275,000 fine, and a county revolt, the last trash train arrives April 19, 2016.
Mt. Sterling's depot saved
Students at the local Area Technology Center begin a restoration of the milepost-90 depot, raising roughly $200,000 — while plans for a 109-mile rail trail on the abandoned grade, floated in 2002, quietly stall.
Steel on the old AC&I
Steel Dynamics' mill at Coalton — Kentucky Electric Steel's successor, acquired in 2018 — remains the sole regular customer on the stub out of Ashland: the same corridor worked continuously since the Lexington & Big Sandy Railway laid rail there in the 1850s.