The Zanesville & Western Railway
Columbus's "Backyard Railroad"
by James M. Cavanaugh
Most Columbus railroad history enthusiasts consider the City to have been served over time by lines radiating out in 15 directions, on long-lived rights-of-way built by the big Class I railroads and their predecessors. However, there was also a little-remembered 16th line, originally known as the Columbus, Shawnee & Hocking Railway, and later as the Zanesville & Western Railway, connecting Columbus with Zanesville and the coalmining city of Shawnee in southern Perry County. This was one of the last Columbus rail routes established in the 19th Century, and was also the first to disappear almost completely. Its story is obscure but fascinating, well worth study and elaboration for posterity.Developed in stages by several affiliated railroads between 1879 and 1890, this wandering Columbus-Zanesville line ran from Union Station north to the Ohio State Fairgrounds, eastward along what is today the Norfolk Southern right-of-way south of 11th Avenue to Woodland Avenue, then angling down to a crossing with the B&O/PRR Panhandle line at a point beneath the Stelzer/James Road overpass. From there it ran southeast through Whitehall to Truro (Hamilton Road and Interstate 70), then due east 22 miles to the Fairfield County village of Thurston, and on another 37 miles to Zanesville. The rail running distance from Columbus to Zanesville was 67 miles, in comparison with the overland driving distance of 55 miles. The CS&H also developed a 44-mile southern division through Muskingum, Morgan and Perry Counties via Corning to Shawnee, featuring numerous short “pea vine” branches snaking up hollows, around hills and through tunnels to coal mines and villages.
PICTURE
*** Page 1 *** During its peak years between 1880 and 1900, the CS&H was the proud equal of most competitors, with 162 miles of main line and branches, a downtown Columbus freight house and terminal yard occupying a city block on Mt. Vernon Avenue, express passenger trains with good connections to the north, east and south, stations in a number of then-rural Franklin County villages, and freight service to a rich, rapidly-growing hinterland in the coal counties. Still active but in decline over the following eight decades, the line became a New York Central and later Conrail dead-end industrial switching track, skirting residential backyards, side yards and even a few front yards, angling across a peaceful golf course and over urban streets and unprotected intersections, disrupting rush hour traffic. The line also formed the boundary between Whitehall and the City of Columbus.
The history of this railroad is confusing and challenging to narrate. At the outset, one has to decide whether the route really was truly a single “railroad”, as opposed to various contiguous lengths of track operated by several companies at different intervals in a somewhat coordinated manner. Secondly, it helps to give this line an appropriate and descriptive single railroad name, and that is likewise no easy task.
A reasonable definition of a “railroad” would be an enterprise with a right-of-way, owned or leased and operated by a single company, running through or connecting trains between its end points. Like many Ohio railroads, this Columbus-Zanesville route was quilted together from multiple short lines built by different companies over a period of four decades. This line’s ownership, name and even its route changed frequently over its lifetime due to railroad bankruptcies, reorganizations and consolidations. However, the rails from Columbus to Zanesville and Shawnee were indeed operated by a single company under a single name and logo during several periods, offering through service end-to-end. At other times when portions of the route were owned by different railroads, these were closely affiliated by equity ownership and under common control, with train schedules coordinated as a single system. So it seems fair to call this route a “railroad”, and conveniently that makes its story easier to tell.
Logically this Zanesville road might best be called the “CS&H”. The Columbus Shawnee & Hocking Railway built and pulled pieces of the route together in the early 1880s and owned it as a single rail property for many years. The CS&H was consolidated with the Sandusky Short Line in the mid-1890s and changed its name to “Columbus, Sandusky & Hocking Railway”, requiring no change of initials on its company logo. During the early 1890s, the CS&H advertised through trains with no change of cars from Columbus Union Station to Zanesville. Following several reorganizations, the CS&H name disappeared. In 1902 the portion of the line east of its crossing with the Cleveland, Akron & Columbus Railroad at Milo became the Zanesville & Western Railway. Railroaders working on the East Columbus Branch in the 1960s still occasionally referred to it as the Z&W. The most detailed Toledo & Ohio Central Railroad map of the 1930s labeled the upper part of the East Columbus Branch as “Z&W”. Accordingly, the “Z&W” label seems to be historically and colloquially defendable as a name for this line. “Z&W” also has a bit more colorful legendary appeal for story-telling purposes.
*** Page 2 *** The Z&W Route
Shaped like a gigantic question mark on the Columbus map, the CS&H ran a mile and a half north from Union Station (High & Naghten Streets) over the Big Four (CCC&StL) right-of-way to a point just southwest of the Ohio State Fairgrounds. Some historical sources indicate the CS&H had its own track just east of the Big Four. Track diagrams from the 1890s suggest the CS&H trains used the Big Four rails up to a turnout between 8th and Bonham Avenues.
The company maintained a ten-track Columbus terminal yard and freight house on a site covering the block bounded by Mt. Vernon Avenue on the south, Neilston (then Neil Street) on the west, 6th Ave. (then Mozette) on the east, and Buckingham Street to the north. The tracks exited this yard to the northeast, with a lead curving all the way over to Cleveland Avenue and then back northwest joining the north-south Big Four tracks near 2nd Avenue.
From the Fairgrounds area, where the CS&H established a station near Fields Avenue, the track ran east for several miles following the rail corridor later occupied by the PRR’s Grogan Yard, crossing the CA&C at Milo, and then on another mile just north of the acreage that later became the joint PRR-N&W Pennor Yard, to Woodland Avenue. This area was well beyond Columbus city limits in the 1880s. Depending on various sources, the CS&H reportedly maintained its Columbus locomotive facilities and another yard along this line south of the Fairgrounds, or approximately where Grogan Yard was later developed. One source, the usually scripturally-reliable Rowlee Steiner 1952 manuscript, places the CS&H yard around the area east of the CA&C that later became Pennor Yard. Other apparently well-researched historical sources show this CS&H yard just east of Cleveland Avenue, with a large brick machine shop built in 1891 just south of Bonham Avenue, with two tracks entering the building from the west.
From Woodland Avenue, the line curved slightly southeastward across Leonard Avenue, through backyards in the village of Shepard, where there was another station, and then east across Sunbury and Nelson Roads and Alum Creek, parallel to and just north of today’s 7th Avenue. From there, the track angled southeastward over 5th Avenue, cutting through residential side yards in the old village of Rarig’s, along the north boundary of the Ralston Steel Car Company works, to a junction with the B&O’s Columbus & Newark line at East Columbus (originally called Alum Creek Junction), at its Stelzer Road crossing. Ralston operated its rail car plant here from 1905-53, having acquired the site from Rarig Engineering, which maintained a machine shop and foundry there from 1868-1903.
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Beyond the diamond at East Columbus, the line ran southeast past a small four or five-track Z&W freight yard, through a security gate into the area that became the Defense Supply Center in 1918, curving through the U.S. Army Officers’ Club golf course built in the late 1940s (now called the Eagle Eye Golf Course). In the 1960s the railroad was literally on the fairway or just in the rough on what were then holes Nos. 2, 3 and 5, with golfers dodging the Local’s slow-footed SW7s. For a time, golfers teeing off on hole No. 4 hit straight across the right of way. From the golf club, the line turned due south, transiting a big warehouse area on the military base, then out the south gate and across Broad Street by the former Creith Lumber and the exotic Kahiki Restaurant sites at Napoleon Avenue. This area was originally the village of Doney’s, where there was a station and an at-grade crossing with the east-west Columbus, Newark & Zanesville interurban line. From Doney’s, the line ran just east of and parallel to Napoleon Avenue across East Main Street, where there was a switching lead into Cotton Lumber, which operated here for many decades. Between Broad and Main, the tracks (and now their remnant earth berm) constitute the city boundary between Columbus and Whitehall.
South of Main, the rails curved southeast through Whitehall and across Livingston Avenue, running between Vilardo and Bostwick Streets, to Truro Station and the big Landmark grain elevator near the present-day intersection of Hamilton Road and Interstate 70. From Truro, the line ran straight east through Brice, Pickerington, Basil and Baltimore to Thurston. From there the line edged around the south shore of Buckeye Lake, crossing the B&O’s Newark, Somerset & Straitsville line at Walser, and on through Mt. Perry, Glenford and Fultonham to Zanesville.
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The Z&W’s tortuous Shawnee Branch veered southward off the Zanesville line at East Fultonham, crossing the PRR’s Cincinnati & Muskingum Valley Railroad at Crooksville, then proceeding south through Sayre to Rendville. From there it paralleled the T&OC line for several miles into Corning, where it crossed to the west over the T&OC and ran through the Corning Tunnel over to Congo and Drakes, there forking northwest to Shawnee, where it connected end-to-end with the B&O’s Newark, Somerset & Straitsville line, and south to the Z&W’s southernmost terminus at Glouster. The 15 miles of branch line between Buckingham, just north of Drakes, and the interchange with the T&OC at Glouster was originally built by the T&OC predecessor Kanawha & Michigan. This track was shared by the Z&W and T&OC. After the Z&W from Sayre to Drakes was abandoned, this track became the T&OC’s Buckingham Branch.
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There were also three smaller Z&W branches serving many active coalmines that dominated this region from the 1880s to 1950s. The Cannelville Branch, built in 1886, ran south from Muskingum, forking at Cannelville and reaching several smaller mines and communities beyond. From about 1900-1930, the San Toy branch ran south from Sayre for several miles through a tunnel to the town of San Toy, a major coal producer in that era. (For interesting old photographs and information about San Toy, see the Little Cities of Black Diamonds website.) At least one 1898 Ohio rail map shows a branch of the Z&W predecessor CS&H running east from Sayre through Porterville and Triadelphia to Shawnee Junction on the B&O, just north of McConnelsville in Morgan County. This branch, formerly part of the Shawnee & Muskingum River Railroad that the CS&H acquired as part of its 1890 southward expansion, appears on Ohio rail maps up through 1902 but is not present on a 1906 resource map made available on the Columbus Railroads site. From the 1890s until some point in the 1930s, another small Z&W branch ran off to the southwest from Saltillo through Redfield, forking southeast and northwest from that point to reach now-long disappeared mines and small villages.
The Z&W maintained about three dozen stations stretching from Columbus Union Depot on the west end to Zanesville and Shawnee to the east and southeast. The stations were small wooden structures built in the style of the era, with overhanging gables, a bay window for the operator, a passenger waiting room and freight office with a wide sliding door. The signage on the stations gave the name of the place in large letters, with mileage indicators on either side stating the distance to Columbus, Zanesville and Shawnee.
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TABLE
Ancestry and Construction
The genesis of the Z&W was the advent of substantial coal traffic moving north and westward from Hocking, Perry, Athens and Muskingum Counties in the 1870s and 80s. Originally carried by rail mainly toward Cleveland, this lucrative flow found additional industrial Midwest markets via steamships on Lake Erie. The Ohio Central had completed its initial rail line from Corning through Thurston and north to Toledo via Johnstown, Bucyrus and Fostoria in the mid-1870s (later to be known as the T&OC’s Eastern Branch). However, by then Columbus was also growing rapidly, with a big appetite for coal, minerals, building materials, and more destinations for these commodities were expanding to the west. By 1880, the Columbus & Sunday Creek Railroad constructed a line connecting Thurston to Alum Creek Junction (today’s East Columbus), giving the Ohio Central coal traffic access to Columbus.
*** Page 7 *** During the early 1880s, the Columbus & Sunday Creek, soon affiliated with the CS&H, ran their trains from Alum Creek Junction into downtown Columbus over the B&O line that would later become the Panhandle route. The last small piece of the line into Columbus, from Alum Creek Junction up through Shepard, through Milo to the Fairgrounds and over to the Big Four right-of-way to Union Station, was built in 1886-7 by another CS&H affiliate, the Columbus & Eastern Railroad, completing the portions of the CS&H and Z&W west of Thurston.
By 1883, the Columbus & Eastern had built tracks from Thurston to Saltillo, with connections at Fultonham via the Columbus & Eastern to the Zanesville area. The CS&H and Ohio Central established its extension from Fultonham to Shawnee by 1890, constructing a 56-lb. track south from Saltillo to Sayre, and acquiring the Shawnee & Muskingum River Railway, a line running east from Shawnee Junction on the Muskingum River near McConnelsville through Sayre to Drakes. The Ohio Central had built a Drakes-Shawnee link in 1883.
During the mid-1890s the character of this operation changed dramatically. In 1892-3, the principal CS&H affiliate, the T&OC, had built a connection directly into Columbus westward from Truro across the N&W at Bannon, through South Columbus and up the Scioto over Miami Crossing to its West Columbus Yard on McKinley Avenue, connecting with the recently-completed T&OC Western Branch up through Marysville, Kenton and Findlay to Toledo. This enabled the T&OC to move Columbus coal traffic directly on its own line instead of interchanging it onto its affiliated CS&H’s Sandusky line or the competing northward lines such as the Big Four, CA&C or C&O predecessor Hocking Valley Railroad. By 1903, the T&OC had also established its own Columbus passenger depot and freight house on West Broad Street. Under the T&OC, passenger and freight traffic into Columbus from Truro moved over to the South Columbus line and away from the old CS&H route up through East Columbus and Shepard.
PICTURE
*** Page 8 *** After the 1902 reorganization and division of the CS&H, the Sandusky Short Line became a Pennsylvania Railroad affiliate, and the Z&W leased its track between the Fairgrounds and Woodland Avenue to the PRR. With the T&OC acquiring the Z&W in 1903 there was no more need for a connection from the upper end of the Branch to downtown Columbus. By the early 1930s the track west of Woodland Avenue was disused, notated as “Track not in Service” on the 1934 Unification Committee Map. Ironically, that fragment is the one bit of the Z&W that has been restored and is back in use today as a switching lead – see photo at end of this article
The line east of Thurston is best remembered as the Zanesville & Western Railway Co., or Z&W, the name it held from 1902 onward. It eventually was designated as the Z&W branch of the T&OC, which in turn was acquired by the New York Central, which became the Penn-Central and eventually Conrail. Its final abandonment and removal in large part occurred in the 1980s when it was part of Conrail.
After 1903 the Ohio Central was running all passenger trains via South Columbus and Truro to Thurston, and from there south to Bremen toward Corning and Hobson. From that point, it appears the Z&W only operated in its own name east of Thurston. There is no evidence in Official Railway Guides that the Z&W ever advertised any direct no-change trains from Columbus to Zanesville. However, after 1903 the T&OC was showing Columbus-Zanesville service via its West Broad Street station, with connections onto the Z&W at Thurston.
Working on the Z&W
As a brakeman working off the T&OC extra board from West Columbus in the 1960s, I occasionally rode NYC through freight and local trains over about a quarter of the Z&W’s original lines in Columbus and to the east and down into Perry County. I will not repeat lengthier details here -- please refer to the “East Columbus Local” and “T&OC Trains South from Columbus” articles at the Columbus Railroads Steam Railroads NYC site for accounts of what it was like to ride the Local and T&OC through trains over this line.
The East Columbus Local switched out the Landmark elevator at Truro, which in the 1960s had a much more extensive rail layout that it does today, plus shippers on the T&OC Western Branch between Bannon and Truro, including the old Buchsieb slaughterhouse just east of Alum Creek. The Local also served a dozen or so active points up the branch to Woodland Avenue. This made for a long hard day’s work, but a rewarding one as the crew would do virtually every physical railroading maneuver that was legal in the State of Ohio, and perhaps a few that were questionable. My favorite was a gravity drop with the train at the Alum Creek bridge. After setting up the Barneby-Cheney works at Cassady Avenue (today Calgon Carbon), which had west-facing points, we would switch the caboose onto the front end of the train, and then pull the locomotive in the clear up the Barneby lead. We would bleed off all the air brakes on the caboose and train, and let everything roll downhill across Alum Creek, using hand brakes to stop short of Nelson road on the west side, then pull the engine out and couple onto the rear (east) end of the train, cut in the air and recharge the brakes. Next we would crawl caboose-first across Nelson and Sunbury Roads, hand-flagging the streets with the conductor Mr. Prenkert tweeting “long/long/short/long” grade-crossing signals on the high-pitched air whistle on the rear brake stanchion, possibly exciting a few robins. The remaining Branch work at the McNally and Blain lumber yards, Albers warehouse and several other shippers near Leonard Avenue, as well as the return trip to Truro, required the engine to be on the east end.
*** Page 9 *** The East Columbus Branch above Truro all the way to Woodland Avenue boasted a well-drained right-of-way, moderately graded except for a dramatic “dip” at Alum Creek, with well-ballasted new ties, and, it appeared, our standard New York Central 127-lb. “road” rail rather than the smaller NYC 105-lb. “yard” rail. This was in sharp contrast with some other remote NYC lines like the St. Marys Branch, which in places had decrepit 90-lb. rail from the 1890s sitting atop rotting 40-year old ties. Some regulars working on the Branch said at some point the NYC decided to give it a serious fix-up, and invested in its longer-term condition. With that big rail and good ballast, carrying only the weekday Local with her light SW7s and GP9s moving at 15 miles per hour, and short mixed freight trains seldom including heavy mineral loads, the branch would have lasted forever with little need for preventative maintenance.
The Z&W in Its Heyday
By a number of historical accounts, the Z&W offered the preferred passenger service from Columbus Union Depot to Zanesville, covering the 67 miles in two and a half hours in the 1890s. (Columbus-Zanesvile passenger service was also available on the PRR via Trinway, the B&O via Newark, and by the Columbus, Newark & Zanesville interurban line.) The last several miles up into Zanesville ran over the tracks of the Zanesville Belt & Terminal Railroad, an interesting combination of rights of way resulting from one of the many rail reorganizations in the first decade of the 20th Century. The complex of tracks and interchanges of the four bigger lines serving Zanesville and its immediate surroundings during that era was extensive.
While the Z&W main line between Truro and Thurston was well-engineered, flat and largely devoid of curvature, the routes through Perry and Muskingum Counties were almost all curves and cuts. Veteran Z&W crews joked that the Shawnee line was so curvy that an engineer could reach out his cab window and shake hands with the conductor on the caboose. Surviving folklore also suggests the tracks were not well maintained, leading local people to call the Z&W as the “Zigzag & Wobble”. This legend inspired composition of a very nice bluegrass tune by the same name. Click here for a link to a Perry County band that does an excellent rendition of Zigzag and Wobble.
The Z&W’s economic lifeblood was obviously hauling coal to Columbus and the its interchange railroads near Zanesville. These lines, including the B&O, PRR precursors Cincinnati & Muskingum Valley (CMV) and CA&C, and predecessors of the N&W such as the Wheeling & Lake Erie, offered good connections to Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Cincinnati markets. Ohio governmental reports from the 1910s and 1920s indicate the Z&W was serving over 100 on-line active coal shippers (see links at the end of this article). Of course, some of these mines were very small, only originating a few cars weekly.
*** Page 10 *** FOLLOWING NEEDS WORK
CS&H Statistics - Poor’s Railroad Manual - 1894 In the years before securities regulation laws, Poor’s Railroad Manuals (a predecessor to today’s Standard & Poor’s investor services) published basic information about publicly-traded railroads. Key statistics for the Columbus, Shawnee & Hocking Ry. as of consolidation with the Sandusky Short Line on December 23, 1893, included the following: Total owned and leased lines at June 30, 1893 - 162.03 miles Rolling Stock: 29 locomotives, 13 passenger coaches, 3 baggage cars, 275 box cars, 153 flat cars, 2173 coal hoppers, 18 cabooses, 30 miscellaneous cars Annual gross revenue: $768,000
Last Days of the Z&W
Following the T&OC absorption into the New York Central in 1922, the Z&W was kept intact and continued to be run as part of the T&OC and eventually the NYC system. The T&OC abandoned the Redfield and San Toy branches at some point in the 1930s after the coalmines there played out. The Central also eventually abandoned the portion of the Z&W Shawnee line between Crooksville and Congo. The T&OC’s Buckingham Branch between Glouster and Drakes allowed the NYC to reach Shawnee and the still-active mines up at Congo and along the branch without maintaining the rail connection and crumbling tunnel between Corning and Drakes. I recall from my time working on the T&OC seeing the barely-visible remnants of the weed-covered Z&W right of way, including a lonely gray lichen-covered wooden crossbuck at what must have been a highway grade crossing north of Rendville. The abutments of the bridge across Sunday Creek in Corning, where the Z&W swung across the T&OC and off to the west through the Corning Tunnel, are still visible just down hill from St. Bernard’s church.
After being cut off at its west end, old Z&W main from Truro up to East Columbus served on for another six decades as the T&OC’s East Columbus Branch. This line continued to have a wealth of active shippers mostly feeding the home building boom as Columbus expanded eastward in the postwar years up through the 1960s, with the territory north of East Columbus eventually being served from the Panhandle from Yard A after the Penn Central merger in 1968. But eventually all that ended.
The 37.1 miles of Z&W between Thurston (Z&W Milepost 28.8, the distance from Columbus) via Fultonham to Zanesville (MP 67.9) was still in service as the NYC’s “Z&W Secondary Track.” when I worked on the T&OC lines in the 1960s. A portion of the Z&W’s former Shawnee Branch between Fultonham and Crooksville also survived as the NYC “Crooksville Running Track” in that era. There were switching jobs for which NYC crews reported, per our Employee Time Table, at Fultonham and Roseville or Crooksville. Old-time railroaders I knew then referred to a Z&W engine house at East Fultonham, but I cannot find any surviving evidence of this. Steam engines in this territory could have been supported by the big roundhouses at West Columbus or Corning (both 50-60 miles distant) for heavy repair service, but would have needed local routine service facilities somewhere around Thurston or Fultonham for daily inspection, lubrication, fire grate and smoke box shake-out, sand and the like.
I recall the Z&W heading east from Thurston as a grass-covered line with rusty rails running between bright green brushy walls of black locust and wild cherry trees. Thurston was once a teeming junction between the Z&W Columbus-Zanesville line and the T&OC’s Corning-Toledo Eastern Branch. But it was rapidly eroding before our eyes in the 1960s. The track near the old crossing of the Z&W and Eastern Branch where the passenger station once stood had been re-routed to provide more of a high-speed straight shot for T&OC Columbus-Corning trains so they could pass well south of the former Z&W diamond on a very gentle curve past Thurston Tower. After that reconfiguration, the Z&W line branched off the Eastern at a wye a hundred yards north of the local grain elevator, next to a stub siding holding little-used track maintenance equipment and a handful of decomposing bad-order cars. Now, five decades later, every trace of the Z&W east of Thurston is gone except a stretch retained by the Mt. Perry-based Z&W Scenic Railway between Fultonham (Z&W MP 56.2) or Glass Rock (MP 45.7) and the stub of the old PRR CM&V line south from Zanesville.
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The Z&W Route
Shaped like a gigantic question mark on the Columbus map, the CS&H ran a mile and a half north from Union Station (High & Naghten Streets) over the Big Four (CCC&StL) right-of-way to a point just southwest of the Ohio State Fairgrounds. Some historical sources indicate the CS&H had its own track just east of the Big Four. Track diagrams from the 1890s suggest the CS&H trains used the Big Four rails up to a turnout between 8th and Bonham Avenues.The company maintained a ten-track Columbus terminal yard and freight house on a site covering the block bounded by Mt. Vernon Avenue on the south, Neilston (then Neil Street) on the west, 6th Ave. (then Mozette) on the east, and Buckingham Street to the north. The tracks exited this yard to the northeast, with a lead curving all the way over to Cleveland Avenue and then back northwest joining the north-south Big Four tracks near 2nd Avenue.
From the Fairgrounds area, where the CS&H established a station near Fields Avenue, the track ran east for several miles following the rail corridor later occupied by the PRR’s Grogan Yard, crossing the CA&C at Milo, and then on another mile just north of the acreage that later became the joint PRR-N&W Pennor Yard, to Woodland Avenue. This area was well beyond Columbus city limits in the 1880s. Depending on various sources, the CS&H reportedly maintained its Columbus locomotive facilities and another yard along this line south of the Fairgrounds, or approximately where Grogan Yard was later developed. One source, the usually scripturally-reliable Rowlee Steiner 1952 manuscript, places the CS&H yard around the area east of the CA&C that later became Pennor Yard. Other apparently well-researched historical sources show this CS&H yard just east of Cleveland Avenue, with a large brick machine shop built in 1891 just south of Bonham Avenue, with two tracks entering the building from the west.
From Woodland Avenue, the line curved slightly southeastward across Leonard Avenue, through backyards in the village of Shepard, where there was another station, and then east across Sunbury and Nelson Roads and Alum Creek, parallel to and just north of today’s 7th Avenue. From there, the track angled southeastward over 5th Avenue, cutting through residential side yards in the old village of Rarig’s, along the north boundary of the Ralston Steel Car Company works, to a junction with the B&O’s Columbus & Newark line at East Columbus (originally called Alum Creek Junction), at its Stelzer Road crossing. Ralston operated its rail car plant here from 1905-53, having acquired the site from Rarig Engineering, which maintained a machine shop and foundry there from 1868-1903.
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Beyond the diamond at East Columbus, the line ran southeast past a small four or five-track Z&W freight yard, through a security gate into the area that became the Defense Supply Center in 1918, curving through the U.S. Army Officers’ Club golf course built in the late 1940s (now called the Eagle Eye Golf Course). In the 1960s the railroad was literally on the fairway or just in the rough on what were then holes Nos. 2, 3 and 5, with golfers dodging the Local’s slow-footed SW7s. For a time, golfers teeing off on hole No. 4 hit straight across the right of way. From the golf club, the line turned due south, transiting a big warehouse area on the military base, then out the south gate and across Broad Street by the former Creith Lumber and the exotic Kahiki Restaurant sites at Napoleon Avenue. This area was originally the village of Doney’s, where there was a station and an at-grade crossing with the east-west Columbus, Newark & Zanesville interurban line. From Doney’s, the line ran just east of and parallel to Napoleon Avenue across East Main Street, where there was a switching lead into Cotton Lumber, which operated here for many decades. Between Broad and Main, the tracks (and now their remnant earth berm) constitute the city boundary between Columbus and Whitehall.
South of Main, the rails curved southeast through Whitehall and across Livingston Avenue, running between Vilardo and Bostwick Streets, to Truro Station and the big Landmark grain elevator near the present-day intersection of Hamilton Road and Interstate 70. From Truro, the line ran straight east through Brice, Pickerington, Basil and Baltimore to Thurston. From there the line edged around the south shore of Buckeye Lake, crossing the B&O’s Newark, Somerset & Straitsville line at Walser, and on through Mt. Perry, Glenford and Fultonham to Zanesville.
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The Z&W’s tortuous Shawnee Branch veered southward off the Zanesville line at East Fultonham, crossing the PRR’s Cincinnati & Muskingum Valley Railroad at Crooksville, then proceeding south through Sayre to Rendville. From there it paralleled the T&OC line for several miles into Corning, where it crossed to the west over the T&OC and ran through the Corning Tunnel over to Congo and Drakes, there forking northwest to Shawnee, where it connected end-to-end with the B&O’s Newark, Somerset & Straitsville line, and south to the Z&W’s southernmost terminus at Glouster. The 15 miles of branch line between Buckingham, just north of Drakes, and the interchange with the T&OC at Glouster was originally built by the T&OC predecessor Kanawha & Michigan. This track was shared by the Z&W and T&OC. After the Z&W from Sayre to Drakes was abandoned, this track became the T&OC’s Buckingham Branch.
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There were also three smaller Z&W branches serving many active coalmines that dominated this region from the 1880s to 1950s. The Cannelville Branch, built in 1886, ran south from Muskingum, forking at Cannelville and reaching several smaller mines and communities beyond. From about 1900-1930, the San Toy branch ran south from Sayre for several miles through a tunnel to the town of San Toy, a major coal producer in that era. (For interesting old photographs and information about San Toy, see the Little Cities of Black Diamonds website.) At least one 1898 Ohio rail map shows a branch of the Z&W predecessor CS&H running east from Sayre through Porterville and Triadelphia to Shawnee Junction on the B&O, just north of McConnelsville in Morgan County. This branch, formerly part of the Shawnee & Muskingum River Railroad that the CS&H acquired as part of its 1890 southward expansion, appears on Ohio rail maps up through 1902 but is not present on a 1906 resource map made available on the Columbus Railroads site. From the 1890s until some point in the 1930s, another small Z&W branch ran off to the southwest from Saltillo through Redfield, forking southeast and northwest from that point to reach now-long disappeared mines and small villages.
The Z&W maintained about three dozen stations stretching from Columbus Union Depot on the west end to Zanesville and Shawnee to the east and southeast. The stations were small wooden structures built in the style of the era, with overhanging gables, a bay window for the operator, a passenger waiting room and freight office with a wide sliding door. The signage on the stations gave the name of the place in large letters, with mileage indicators on either side stating the distance to Columbus, Zanesville and Shawnee.
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TABLE
Ancestry and Construction
The genesis of the Z&W was the advent of substantial coal traffic moving north and westward from Hocking, Perry, Athens and Muskingum Counties in the 1870s and 80s. Originally carried by rail mainly toward Cleveland, this lucrative flow found additional industrial Midwest markets via steamships on Lake Erie. The Ohio Central had completed its initial rail line from Corning through Thurston and north to Toledo via Johnstown, Bucyrus and Fostoria in the mid-1870s (later to be known as the T&OC’s Eastern Branch). However, by then Columbus was also growing rapidly, with a big appetite for coal, minerals, building materials, and more destinations for these commodities were expanding to the west. By 1880, the Columbus & Sunday Creek Railroad constructed a line connecting Thurston to Alum Creek Junction (today’s East Columbus), giving the Ohio Central coal traffic access to Columbus.
*** Page 7 *** During the early 1880s, the Columbus & Sunday Creek, soon affiliated with the CS&H, ran their trains from Alum Creek Junction into downtown Columbus over the B&O line that would later become the Panhandle route. The last small piece of the line into Columbus, from Alum Creek Junction up through Shepard, through Milo to the Fairgrounds and over to the Big Four right-of-way to Union Station, was built in 1886-7 by another CS&H affiliate, the Columbus & Eastern Railroad, completing the portions of the CS&H and Z&W west of Thurston.
By 1883, the Columbus & Eastern had built tracks from Thurston to Saltillo, with connections at Fultonham via the Columbus & Eastern to the Zanesville area. The CS&H and Ohio Central established its extension from Fultonham to Shawnee by 1890, constructing a 56-lb. track south from Saltillo to Sayre, and acquiring the Shawnee & Muskingum River Railway, a line running east from Shawnee Junction on the Muskingum River near McConnelsville through Sayre to Drakes. The Ohio Central had built a Drakes-Shawnee link in 1883.
During the mid-1890s the character of this operation changed dramatically. In 1892-3, the principal CS&H affiliate, the T&OC, had built a connection directly into Columbus westward from Truro across the N&W at Bannon, through South Columbus and up the Scioto over Miami Crossing to its West Columbus Yard on McKinley Avenue, connecting with the recently-completed T&OC Western Branch up through Marysville, Kenton and Findlay to Toledo. This enabled the T&OC to move Columbus coal traffic directly on its own line instead of interchanging it onto its affiliated CS&H’s Sandusky line or the competing northward lines such as the Big Four, CA&C or C&O predecessor Hocking Valley Railroad. By 1903, the T&OC had also established its own Columbus passenger depot and freight house on West Broad Street. Under the T&OC, passenger and freight traffic into Columbus from Truro moved over to the South Columbus line and away from the old CS&H route up through East Columbus and Shepard.
PICTURE
*** Page 8 *** After the 1902 reorganization and division of the CS&H, the Sandusky Short Line became a Pennsylvania Railroad affiliate, and the Z&W leased its track between the Fairgrounds and Woodland Avenue to the PRR. With the T&OC acquiring the Z&W in 1903 there was no more need for a connection from the upper end of the Branch to downtown Columbus. By the early 1930s the track west of Woodland Avenue was disused, notated as “Track not in Service” on the 1934 Unification Committee Map. Ironically, that fragment is the one bit of the Z&W that has been restored and is back in use today as a switching lead – see photo at end of this article
The line east of Thurston is best remembered as the Zanesville & Western Railway Co., or Z&W, the name it held from 1902 onward. It eventually was designated as the Z&W branch of the T&OC, which in turn was acquired by the New York Central, which became the Penn-Central and eventually Conrail. Its final abandonment and removal in large part occurred in the 1980s when it was part of Conrail.
After 1903 the Ohio Central was running all passenger trains via South Columbus and Truro to Thurston, and from there south to Bremen toward Corning and Hobson. From that point, it appears the Z&W only operated in its own name east of Thurston. There is no evidence in Official Railway Guides that the Z&W ever advertised any direct no-change trains from Columbus to Zanesville. However, after 1903 the T&OC was showing Columbus-Zanesville service via its West Broad Street station, with connections onto the Z&W at Thurston.
Working on the Z&W
As a brakeman working off the T&OC extra board from West Columbus in the 1960s, I occasionally rode NYC through freight and local trains over about a quarter of the Z&W’s original lines in Columbus and to the east and down into Perry County. I will not repeat lengthier details here -- please refer to the “East Columbus Local” and “T&OC Trains South from Columbus” articles at the Columbus Railroads Steam Railroads NYC site for accounts of what it was like to ride the Local and T&OC through trains over this line.
The East Columbus Local switched out the Landmark elevator at Truro, which in the 1960s had a much more extensive rail layout that it does today, plus shippers on the T&OC Western Branch between Bannon and Truro, including the old Buchsieb slaughterhouse just east of Alum Creek. The Local also served a dozen or so active points up the branch to Woodland Avenue. This made for a long hard day’s work, but a rewarding one as the crew would do virtually every physical railroading maneuver that was legal in the State of Ohio, and perhaps a few that were questionable. My favorite was a gravity drop with the train at the Alum Creek bridge. After setting up the Barneby-Cheney works at Cassady Avenue (today Calgon Carbon), which had west-facing points, we would switch the caboose onto the front end of the train, and then pull the locomotive in the clear up the Barneby lead. We would bleed off all the air brakes on the caboose and train, and let everything roll downhill across Alum Creek, using hand brakes to stop short of Nelson road on the west side, then pull the engine out and couple onto the rear (east) end of the train, cut in the air and recharge the brakes. Next we would crawl caboose-first across Nelson and Sunbury Roads, hand-flagging the streets with the conductor Mr. Prenkert tweeting “long/long/short/long” grade-crossing signals on the high-pitched air whistle on the rear brake stanchion, possibly exciting a few robins. The remaining Branch work at the McNally and Blain lumber yards, Albers warehouse and several other shippers near Leonard Avenue, as well as the return trip to Truro, required the engine to be on the east end.
*** Page 9 *** The East Columbus Branch above Truro all the way to Woodland Avenue boasted a well-drained right-of-way, moderately graded except for a dramatic “dip” at Alum Creek, with well-ballasted new ties, and, it appeared, our standard New York Central 127-lb. “road” rail rather than the smaller NYC 105-lb. “yard” rail. This was in sharp contrast with some other remote NYC lines like the St. Marys Branch, which in places had decrepit 90-lb. rail from the 1890s sitting atop rotting 40-year old ties. Some regulars working on the Branch said at some point the NYC decided to give it a serious fix-up, and invested in its longer-term condition. With that big rail and good ballast, carrying only the weekday Local with her light SW7s and GP9s moving at 15 miles per hour, and short mixed freight trains seldom including heavy mineral loads, the branch would have lasted forever with little need for preventative maintenance.
The Z&W in Its Heyday
By a number of historical accounts, the Z&W offered the preferred passenger service from Columbus Union Depot to Zanesville, covering the 67 miles in two and a half hours in the 1890s. (Columbus-Zanesvile passenger service was also available on the PRR via Trinway, the B&O via Newark, and by the Columbus, Newark & Zanesville interurban line.) The last several miles up into Zanesville ran over the tracks of the Zanesville Belt & Terminal Railroad, an interesting combination of rights of way resulting from one of the many rail reorganizations in the first decade of the 20th Century. The complex of tracks and interchanges of the four bigger lines serving Zanesville and its immediate surroundings during that era was extensive.
While the Z&W main line between Truro and Thurston was well-engineered, flat and largely devoid of curvature, the routes through Perry and Muskingum Counties were almost all curves and cuts. Veteran Z&W crews joked that the Shawnee line was so curvy that an engineer could reach out his cab window and shake hands with the conductor on the caboose. Surviving folklore also suggests the tracks were not well maintained, leading local people to call the Z&W as the “Zigzag & Wobble”. This legend inspired composition of a very nice bluegrass tune by the same name. Click here for a link to a Perry County band that does an excellent rendition of Zigzag and Wobble.
The Z&W’s economic lifeblood was obviously hauling coal to Columbus and the its interchange railroads near Zanesville. These lines, including the B&O, PRR precursors Cincinnati & Muskingum Valley (CMV) and CA&C, and predecessors of the N&W such as the Wheeling & Lake Erie, offered good connections to Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Cincinnati markets. Ohio governmental reports from the 1910s and 1920s indicate the Z&W was serving over 100 on-line active coal shippers (see links at the end of this article). Of course, some of these mines were very small, only originating a few cars weekly.
*** Page 10 *** FOLLOWING NEEDS WORK
CS&H Statistics - Poor’s Railroad Manual - 1894 In the years before securities regulation laws, Poor’s Railroad Manuals (a predecessor to today’s Standard & Poor’s investor services) published basic information about publicly-traded railroads. Key statistics for the Columbus, Shawnee & Hocking Ry. as of consolidation with the Sandusky Short Line on December 23, 1893, included the following: Total owned and leased lines at June 30, 1893 - 162.03 miles Rolling Stock: 29 locomotives, 13 passenger coaches, 3 baggage cars, 275 box cars, 153 flat cars, 2173 coal hoppers, 18 cabooses, 30 miscellaneous cars Annual gross revenue: $768,000
Last Days of the Z&W
Following the T&OC absorption into the New York Central in 1922, the Z&W was kept intact and continued to be run as part of the T&OC and eventually the NYC system. The T&OC abandoned the Redfield and San Toy branches at some point in the 1930s after the coalmines there played out. The Central also eventually abandoned the portion of the Z&W Shawnee line between Crooksville and Congo. The T&OC’s Buckingham Branch between Glouster and Drakes allowed the NYC to reach Shawnee and the still-active mines up at Congo and along the branch without maintaining the rail connection and crumbling tunnel between Corning and Drakes. I recall from my time working on the T&OC seeing the barely-visible remnants of the weed-covered Z&W right of way, including a lonely gray lichen-covered wooden crossbuck at what must have been a highway grade crossing north of Rendville. The abutments of the bridge across Sunday Creek in Corning, where the Z&W swung across the T&OC and off to the west through the Corning Tunnel, are still visible just down hill from St. Bernard’s church.
After being cut off at its west end, old Z&W main from Truro up to East Columbus served on for another six decades as the T&OC’s East Columbus Branch. This line continued to have a wealth of active shippers mostly feeding the home building boom as Columbus expanded eastward in the postwar years up through the 1960s, with the territory north of East Columbus eventually being served from the Panhandle from Yard A after the Penn Central merger in 1968. But eventually all that ended.
The 37.1 miles of Z&W between Thurston (Z&W Milepost 28.8, the distance from Columbus) via Fultonham to Zanesville (MP 67.9) was still in service as the NYC’s “Z&W Secondary Track.” when I worked on the T&OC lines in the 1960s. A portion of the Z&W’s former Shawnee Branch between Fultonham and Crooksville also survived as the NYC “Crooksville Running Track” in that era. There were switching jobs for which NYC crews reported, per our Employee Time Table, at Fultonham and Roseville or Crooksville. Old-time railroaders I knew then referred to a Z&W engine house at East Fultonham, but I cannot find any surviving evidence of this. Steam engines in this territory could have been supported by the big roundhouses at West Columbus or Corning (both 50-60 miles distant) for heavy repair service, but would have needed local routine service facilities somewhere around Thurston or Fultonham for daily inspection, lubrication, fire grate and smoke box shake-out, sand and the like.
I recall the Z&W heading east from Thurston as a grass-covered line with rusty rails running between bright green brushy walls of black locust and wild cherry trees. Thurston was once a teeming junction between the Z&W Columbus-Zanesville line and the T&OC’s Corning-Toledo Eastern Branch. But it was rapidly eroding before our eyes in the 1960s. The track near the old crossing of the Z&W and Eastern Branch where the passenger station once stood had been re-routed to provide more of a high-speed straight shot for T&OC Columbus-Corning trains so they could pass well south of the former Z&W diamond on a very gentle curve past Thurston Tower. After that reconfiguration, the Z&W line branched off the Eastern at a wye a hundred yards north of the local grain elevator, next to a stub siding holding little-used track maintenance equipment and a handful of decomposing bad-order cars. Now, five decades later, every trace of the Z&W east of Thurston is gone except a stretch retained by the Mt. Perry-based Z&W Scenic Railway between Fultonham (Z&W MP 56.2) or Glass Rock (MP 45.7) and the stub of the old PRR CM&V line south from Zanesville.
*** Page 11 ***
The Z&W’s tortuous Shawnee Branch veered southward off the Zanesville line at East Fultonham, crossing the PRR’s Cincinnati & Muskingum Valley Railroad at Crooksville, then proceeding south through Sayre to Rendville. From there it paralleled the T&OC line for several miles into Corning, where it crossed to the west over the T&OC and ran through the Corning Tunnel over to Congo and Drakes, there forking northwest to Shawnee, where it connected end-to-end with the B&O’s Newark, Somerset & Straitsville line, and south to the Z&W’s southernmost terminus at Glouster. The 15 miles of branch line between Buckingham, just north of Drakes, and the interchange with the T&OC at Glouster was originally built by the T&OC predecessor Kanawha & Michigan. This track was shared by the Z&W and T&OC. After the Z&W from Sayre to Drakes was abandoned, this track became the T&OC’s Buckingham Branch.
*** Page 5 *** PICTURE
There were also three smaller Z&W branches serving many active coalmines that dominated this region from the 1880s to 1950s. The Cannelville Branch, built in 1886, ran south from Muskingum, forking at Cannelville and reaching several smaller mines and communities beyond. From about 1900-1930, the San Toy branch ran south from Sayre for several miles through a tunnel to the town of San Toy, a major coal producer in that era. (For interesting old photographs and information about San Toy, see the Little Cities of Black Diamonds website.) At least one 1898 Ohio rail map shows a branch of the Z&W predecessor CS&H running east from Sayre through Porterville and Triadelphia to Shawnee Junction on the B&O, just north of McConnelsville in Morgan County. This branch, formerly part of the Shawnee & Muskingum River Railroad that the CS&H acquired as part of its 1890 southward expansion, appears on Ohio rail maps up through 1902 but is not present on a 1906 resource map made available on the Columbus Railroads site. From the 1890s until some point in the 1930s, another small Z&W branch ran off to the southwest from Saltillo through Redfield, forking southeast and northwest from that point to reach now-long disappeared mines and small villages.
The Z&W maintained about three dozen stations stretching from Columbus Union Depot on the west end to Zanesville and Shawnee to the east and southeast. The stations were small wooden structures built in the style of the era, with overhanging gables, a bay window for the operator, a passenger waiting room and freight office with a wide sliding door. The signage on the stations gave the name of the place in large letters, with mileage indicators on either side stating the distance to Columbus, Zanesville and Shawnee.
*** Page 6 *** PICTURE
TABLE
Ancestry and Construction
The genesis of the Z&W was the advent of substantial coal traffic moving north and westward from Hocking, Perry, Athens and Muskingum Counties in the 1870s and 80s. Originally carried by rail mainly toward Cleveland, this lucrative flow found additional industrial Midwest markets via steamships on Lake Erie. The Ohio Central had completed its initial rail line from Corning through Thurston and north to Toledo via Johnstown, Bucyrus and Fostoria in the mid-1870s (later to be known as the T&OC’s Eastern Branch). However, by then Columbus was also growing rapidly, with a big appetite for coal, minerals, building materials, and more destinations for these commodities were expanding to the west. By 1880, the Columbus & Sunday Creek Railroad constructed a line connecting Thurston to Alum Creek Junction (today’s East Columbus), giving the Ohio Central coal traffic access to Columbus.
*** Page 7 *** During the early 1880s, the Columbus & Sunday Creek, soon affiliated with the CS&H, ran their trains from Alum Creek Junction into downtown Columbus over the B&O line that would later become the Panhandle route. The last small piece of the line into Columbus, from Alum Creek Junction up through Shepard, through Milo to the Fairgrounds and over to the Big Four right-of-way to Union Station, was built in 1886-7 by another CS&H affiliate, the Columbus & Eastern Railroad, completing the portions of the CS&H and Z&W west of Thurston.
By 1883, the Columbus & Eastern had built tracks from Thurston to Saltillo, with connections at Fultonham via the Columbus & Eastern to the Zanesville area. The CS&H and Ohio Central established its extension from Fultonham to Shawnee by 1890, constructing a 56-lb. track south from Saltillo to Sayre, and acquiring the Shawnee & Muskingum River Railway, a line running east from Shawnee Junction on the Muskingum River near McConnelsville through Sayre to Drakes. The Ohio Central had built a Drakes-Shawnee link in 1883.
During the mid-1890s the character of this operation changed dramatically. In 1892-3, the principal CS&H affiliate, the T&OC, had built a connection directly into Columbus westward from Truro across the N&W at Bannon, through South Columbus and up the Scioto over Miami Crossing to its West Columbus Yard on McKinley Avenue, connecting with the recently-completed T&OC Western Branch up through Marysville, Kenton and Findlay to Toledo. This enabled the T&OC to move Columbus coal traffic directly on its own line instead of interchanging it onto its affiliated CS&H’s Sandusky line or the competing northward lines such as the Big Four, CA&C or C&O predecessor Hocking Valley Railroad. By 1903, the T&OC had also established its own Columbus passenger depot and freight house on West Broad Street. Under the T&OC, passenger and freight traffic into Columbus from Truro moved over to the South Columbus line and away from the old CS&H route up through East Columbus and Shepard.
PICTURE
*** Page 8 *** After the 1902 reorganization and division of the CS&H, the Sandusky Short Line became a Pennsylvania Railroad affiliate, and the Z&W leased its track between the Fairgrounds and Woodland Avenue to the PRR. With the T&OC acquiring the Z&W in 1903 there was no more need for a connection from the upper end of the Branch to downtown Columbus. By the early 1930s the track west of Woodland Avenue was disused, notated as “Track not in Service” on the 1934 Unification Committee Map. Ironically, that fragment is the one bit of the Z&W that has been restored and is back in use today as a switching lead – see photo at end of this article
The line east of Thurston is best remembered as the Zanesville & Western Railway Co., or Z&W, the name it held from 1902 onward. It eventually was designated as the Z&W branch of the T&OC, which in turn was acquired by the New York Central, which became the Penn-Central and eventually Conrail. Its final abandonment and removal in large part occurred in the 1980s when it was part of Conrail.
After 1903 the Ohio Central was running all passenger trains via South Columbus and Truro to Thurston, and from there south to Bremen toward Corning and Hobson. From that point, it appears the Z&W only operated in its own name east of Thurston. There is no evidence in Official Railway Guides that the Z&W ever advertised any direct no-change trains from Columbus to Zanesville. However, after 1903 the T&OC was showing Columbus-Zanesville service via its West Broad Street station, with connections onto the Z&W at Thurston.
Working on the Z&W
As a brakeman working off the T&OC extra board from West Columbus in the 1960s, I occasionally rode NYC through freight and local trains over about a quarter of the Z&W’s original lines in Columbus and to the east and down into Perry County. I will not repeat lengthier details here -- please refer to the “East Columbus Local” and “T&OC Trains South from Columbus” articles at the Columbus Railroads Steam Railroads NYC site for accounts of what it was like to ride the Local and T&OC through trains over this line.
The East Columbus Local switched out the Landmark elevator at Truro, which in the 1960s had a much more extensive rail layout that it does today, plus shippers on the T&OC Western Branch between Bannon and Truro, including the old Buchsieb slaughterhouse just east of Alum Creek. The Local also served a dozen or so active points up the branch to Woodland Avenue. This made for a long hard day’s work, but a rewarding one as the crew would do virtually every physical railroading maneuver that was legal in the State of Ohio, and perhaps a few that were questionable. My favorite was a gravity drop with the train at the Alum Creek bridge. After setting up the Barneby-Cheney works at Cassady Avenue (today Calgon Carbon), which had west-facing points, we would switch the caboose onto the front end of the train, and then pull the locomotive in the clear up the Barneby lead. We would bleed off all the air brakes on the caboose and train, and let everything roll downhill across Alum Creek, using hand brakes to stop short of Nelson road on the west side, then pull the engine out and couple onto the rear (east) end of the train, cut in the air and recharge the brakes. Next we would crawl caboose-first across Nelson and Sunbury Roads, hand-flagging the streets with the conductor Mr. Prenkert tweeting “long/long/short/long” grade-crossing signals on the high-pitched air whistle on the rear brake stanchion, possibly exciting a few robins. The remaining Branch work at the McNally and Blain lumber yards, Albers warehouse and several other shippers near Leonard Avenue, as well as the return trip to Truro, required the engine to be on the east end.
*** Page 9 *** The East Columbus Branch above Truro all the way to Woodland Avenue boasted a well-drained right-of-way, moderately graded except for a dramatic “dip” at Alum Creek, with well-ballasted new ties, and, it appeared, our standard New York Central 127-lb. “road” rail rather than the smaller NYC 105-lb. “yard” rail. This was in sharp contrast with some other remote NYC lines like the St. Marys Branch, which in places had decrepit 90-lb. rail from the 1890s sitting atop rotting 40-year old ties. Some regulars working on the Branch said at some point the NYC decided to give it a serious fix-up, and invested in its longer-term condition. With that big rail and good ballast, carrying only the weekday Local with her light SW7s and GP9s moving at 15 miles per hour, and short mixed freight trains seldom including heavy mineral loads, the branch would have lasted forever with little need for preventative maintenance.
The Z&W in Its Heyday
By a number of historical accounts, the Z&W offered the preferred passenger service from Columbus Union Depot to Zanesville, covering the 67 miles in two and a half hours in the 1890s. (Columbus-Zanesvile passenger service was also available on the PRR via Trinway, the B&O via Newark, and by the Columbus, Newark & Zanesville interurban line.) The last several miles up into Zanesville ran over the tracks of the Zanesville Belt & Terminal Railroad, an interesting combination of rights of way resulting from one of the many rail reorganizations in the first decade of the 20th Century. The complex of tracks and interchanges of the four bigger lines serving Zanesville and its immediate surroundings during that era was extensive.
While the Z&W main line between Truro and Thurston was well-engineered, flat and largely devoid of curvature, the routes through Perry and Muskingum Counties were almost all curves and cuts. Veteran Z&W crews joked that the Shawnee line was so curvy that an engineer could reach out his cab window and shake hands with the conductor on the caboose. Surviving folklore also suggests the tracks were not well maintained, leading local people to call the Z&W as the “Zigzag & Wobble”. This legend inspired composition of a very nice bluegrass tune by the same name. Click here for a link to a Perry County band that does an excellent rendition of Zigzag and Wobble.
The Z&W’s economic lifeblood was obviously hauling coal to Columbus and the its interchange railroads near Zanesville. These lines, including the B&O, PRR precursors Cincinnati & Muskingum Valley (CMV) and CA&C, and predecessors of the N&W such as the Wheeling & Lake Erie, offered good connections to Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Cincinnati markets. Ohio governmental reports from the 1910s and 1920s indicate the Z&W was serving over 100 on-line active coal shippers (see links at the end of this article). Of course, some of these mines were very small, only originating a few cars weekly.
*** Page 10 *** FOLLOWING NEEDS WORK
CS&H Statistics - Poor’s Railroad Manual - 1894 In the years before securities regulation laws, Poor’s Railroad Manuals (a predecessor to today’s Standard & Poor’s investor services) published basic information about publicly-traded railroads. Key statistics for the Columbus, Shawnee & Hocking Ry. as of consolidation with the Sandusky Short Line on December 23, 1893, included the following: Total owned and leased lines at June 30, 1893 - 162.03 miles Rolling Stock: 29 locomotives, 13 passenger coaches, 3 baggage cars, 275 box cars, 153 flat cars, 2173 coal hoppers, 18 cabooses, 30 miscellaneous cars Annual gross revenue: $768,000
Last Days of the Z&W
Following the T&OC absorption into the New York Central in 1922, the Z&W was kept intact and continued to be run as part of the T&OC and eventually the NYC system. The T&OC abandoned the Redfield and San Toy branches at some point in the 1930s after the coalmines there played out. The Central also eventually abandoned the portion of the Z&W Shawnee line between Crooksville and Congo. The T&OC’s Buckingham Branch between Glouster and Drakes allowed the NYC to reach Shawnee and the still-active mines up at Congo and along the branch without maintaining the rail connection and crumbling tunnel between Corning and Drakes. I recall from my time working on the T&OC seeing the barely-visible remnants of the weed-covered Z&W right of way, including a lonely gray lichen-covered wooden crossbuck at what must have been a highway grade crossing north of Rendville. The abutments of the bridge across Sunday Creek in Corning, where the Z&W swung across the T&OC and off to the west through the Corning Tunnel, are still visible just down hill from St. Bernard’s church.
After being cut off at its west end, old Z&W main from Truro up to East Columbus served on for another six decades as the T&OC’s East Columbus Branch. This line continued to have a wealth of active shippers mostly feeding the home building boom as Columbus expanded eastward in the postwar years up through the 1960s, with the territory north of East Columbus eventually being served from the Panhandle from Yard A after the Penn Central merger in 1968. But eventually all that ended.
The 37.1 miles of Z&W between Thurston (Z&W Milepost 28.8, the distance from Columbus) via Fultonham to Zanesville (MP 67.9) was still in service as the NYC’s “Z&W Secondary Track.” when I worked on the T&OC lines in the 1960s. A portion of the Z&W’s former Shawnee Branch between Fultonham and Crooksville also survived as the NYC “Crooksville Running Track” in that era. There were switching jobs for which NYC crews reported, per our Employee Time Table, at Fultonham and Roseville or Crooksville. Old-time railroaders I knew then referred to a Z&W engine house at East Fultonham, but I cannot find any surviving evidence of this. Steam engines in this territory could have been supported by the big roundhouses at West Columbus or Corning (both 50-60 miles distant) for heavy repair service, but would have needed local routine service facilities somewhere around Thurston or Fultonham for daily inspection, lubrication, fire grate and smoke box shake-out, sand and the like.
I recall the Z&W heading east from Thurston as a grass-covered line with rusty rails running between bright green brushy walls of black locust and wild cherry trees. Thurston was once a teeming junction between the Z&W Columbus-Zanesville line and the T&OC’s Corning-Toledo Eastern Branch. But it was rapidly eroding before our eyes in the 1960s. The track near the old crossing of the Z&W and Eastern Branch where the passenger station once stood had been re-routed to provide more of a high-speed straight shot for T&OC Columbus-Corning trains so they could pass well south of the former Z&W diamond on a very gentle curve past Thurston Tower. After that reconfiguration, the Z&W line branched off the Eastern at a wye a hundred yards north of the local grain elevator, next to a stub siding holding little-used track maintenance equipment and a handful of decomposing bad-order cars. Now, five decades later, every trace of the Z&W east of Thurston is gone except a stretch retained by the Mt. Perry-based Z&W Scenic Railway between Fultonham (Z&W MP 56.2) or Glass Rock (MP 45.7) and the stub of the old PRR CM&V line south from Zanesville.
*** Page 11 ***
TABLE
Ancestry and Construction
The genesis of the Z&W was the advent of substantial coal traffic moving north and westward from Hocking, Perry, Athens and Muskingum Counties in the 1870s and 80s. Originally carried by rail mainly toward Cleveland, this lucrative flow found additional industrial Midwest markets via steamships on Lake Erie. The Ohio Central had completed its initial rail line from Corning through Thurston and north to Toledo via Johnstown, Bucyrus and Fostoria in the mid-1870s (later to be known as the T&OC’s Eastern Branch). However, by then Columbus was also growing rapidly, with a big appetite for coal, minerals, building materials, and more destinations for these commodities were expanding to the west. By 1880, the Columbus & Sunday Creek Railroad constructed a line connecting Thurston to Alum Creek Junction (today’s East Columbus), giving the Ohio Central coal traffic access to Columbus.*** Page 7 *** During the early 1880s, the Columbus & Sunday Creek, soon affiliated with the CS&H, ran their trains from Alum Creek Junction into downtown Columbus over the B&O line that would later become the Panhandle route. The last small piece of the line into Columbus, from Alum Creek Junction up through Shepard, through Milo to the Fairgrounds and over to the Big Four right-of-way to Union Station, was built in 1886-7 by another CS&H affiliate, the Columbus & Eastern Railroad, completing the portions of the CS&H and Z&W west of Thurston.
By 1883, the Columbus & Eastern had built tracks from Thurston to Saltillo, with connections at Fultonham via the Columbus & Eastern to the Zanesville area. The CS&H and Ohio Central established its extension from Fultonham to Shawnee by 1890, constructing a 56-lb. track south from Saltillo to Sayre, and acquiring the Shawnee & Muskingum River Railway, a line running east from Shawnee Junction on the Muskingum River near McConnelsville through Sayre to Drakes. The Ohio Central had built a Drakes-Shawnee link in 1883.
During the mid-1890s the character of this operation changed dramatically. In 1892-3, the principal CS&H affiliate, the T&OC, had built a connection directly into Columbus westward from Truro across the N&W at Bannon, through South Columbus and up the Scioto over Miami Crossing to its West Columbus Yard on McKinley Avenue, connecting with the recently-completed T&OC Western Branch up through Marysville, Kenton and Findlay to Toledo. This enabled the T&OC to move Columbus coal traffic directly on its own line instead of interchanging it onto its affiliated CS&H’s Sandusky line or the competing northward lines such as the Big Four, CA&C or C&O predecessor Hocking Valley Railroad. By 1903, the T&OC had also established its own Columbus passenger depot and freight house on West Broad Street. Under the T&OC, passenger and freight traffic into Columbus from Truro moved over to the South Columbus line and away from the old CS&H route up through East Columbus and Shepard.
PICTURE
*** Page 8 *** After the 1902 reorganization and division of the CS&H, the Sandusky Short Line became a Pennsylvania Railroad affiliate, and the Z&W leased its track between the Fairgrounds and Woodland Avenue to the PRR. With the T&OC acquiring the Z&W in 1903 there was no more need for a connection from the upper end of the Branch to downtown Columbus. By the early 1930s the track west of Woodland Avenue was disused, notated as “Track not in Service” on the 1934 Unification Committee Map. Ironically, that fragment is the one bit of the Z&W that has been restored and is back in use today as a switching lead – see photo at end of this article
The line east of Thurston is best remembered as the Zanesville & Western Railway Co., or Z&W, the name it held from 1902 onward. It eventually was designated as the Z&W branch of the T&OC, which in turn was acquired by the New York Central, which became the Penn-Central and eventually Conrail. Its final abandonment and removal in large part occurred in the 1980s when it was part of Conrail.
After 1903 the Ohio Central was running all passenger trains via South Columbus and Truro to Thurston, and from there south to Bremen toward Corning and Hobson. From that point, it appears the Z&W only operated in its own name east of Thurston. There is no evidence in Official Railway Guides that the Z&W ever advertised any direct no-change trains from Columbus to Zanesville. However, after 1903 the T&OC was showing Columbus-Zanesville service via its West Broad Street station, with connections onto the Z&W at Thurston.
Working on the Z&W
As a brakeman working off the T&OC extra board from West Columbus in the 1960s, I occasionally rode NYC through freight and local trains over about a quarter of the Z&W’s original lines in Columbus and to the east and down into Perry County. I will not repeat lengthier details here -- please refer to the “East Columbus Local” and “T&OC Trains South from Columbus” articles at the Columbus Railroads Steam Railroads NYC site for accounts of what it was like to ride the Local and T&OC through trains over this line.
The East Columbus Local switched out the Landmark elevator at Truro, which in the 1960s had a much more extensive rail layout that it does today, plus shippers on the T&OC Western Branch between Bannon and Truro, including the old Buchsieb slaughterhouse just east of Alum Creek. The Local also served a dozen or so active points up the branch to Woodland Avenue. This made for a long hard day’s work, but a rewarding one as the crew would do virtually every physical railroading maneuver that was legal in the State of Ohio, and perhaps a few that were questionable. My favorite was a gravity drop with the train at the Alum Creek bridge. After setting up the Barneby-Cheney works at Cassady Avenue (today Calgon Carbon), which had west-facing points, we would switch the caboose onto the front end of the train, and then pull the locomotive in the clear up the Barneby lead. We would bleed off all the air brakes on the caboose and train, and let everything roll downhill across Alum Creek, using hand brakes to stop short of Nelson road on the west side, then pull the engine out and couple onto the rear (east) end of the train, cut in the air and recharge the brakes. Next we would crawl caboose-first across Nelson and Sunbury Roads, hand-flagging the streets with the conductor Mr. Prenkert tweeting “long/long/short/long” grade-crossing signals on the high-pitched air whistle on the rear brake stanchion, possibly exciting a few robins. The remaining Branch work at the McNally and Blain lumber yards, Albers warehouse and several other shippers near Leonard Avenue, as well as the return trip to Truro, required the engine to be on the east end.
*** Page 9 *** The East Columbus Branch above Truro all the way to Woodland Avenue boasted a well-drained right-of-way, moderately graded except for a dramatic “dip” at Alum Creek, with well-ballasted new ties, and, it appeared, our standard New York Central 127-lb. “road” rail rather than the smaller NYC 105-lb. “yard” rail. This was in sharp contrast with some other remote NYC lines like the St. Marys Branch, which in places had decrepit 90-lb. rail from the 1890s sitting atop rotting 40-year old ties. Some regulars working on the Branch said at some point the NYC decided to give it a serious fix-up, and invested in its longer-term condition. With that big rail and good ballast, carrying only the weekday Local with her light SW7s and GP9s moving at 15 miles per hour, and short mixed freight trains seldom including heavy mineral loads, the branch would have lasted forever with little need for preventative maintenance.
The Z&W in Its Heyday
By a number of historical accounts, the Z&W offered the preferred passenger service from Columbus Union Depot to Zanesville, covering the 67 miles in two and a half hours in the 1890s. (Columbus-Zanesvile passenger service was also available on the PRR via Trinway, the B&O via Newark, and by the Columbus, Newark & Zanesville interurban line.) The last several miles up into Zanesville ran over the tracks of the Zanesville Belt & Terminal Railroad, an interesting combination of rights of way resulting from one of the many rail reorganizations in the first decade of the 20th Century. The complex of tracks and interchanges of the four bigger lines serving Zanesville and its immediate surroundings during that era was extensive.
While the Z&W main line between Truro and Thurston was well-engineered, flat and largely devoid of curvature, the routes through Perry and Muskingum Counties were almost all curves and cuts. Veteran Z&W crews joked that the Shawnee line was so curvy that an engineer could reach out his cab window and shake hands with the conductor on the caboose. Surviving folklore also suggests the tracks were not well maintained, leading local people to call the Z&W as the “Zigzag & Wobble”. This legend inspired composition of a very nice bluegrass tune by the same name. Click here for a link to a Perry County band that does an excellent rendition of Zigzag and Wobble.
The Z&W’s economic lifeblood was obviously hauling coal to Columbus and the its interchange railroads near Zanesville. These lines, including the B&O, PRR precursors Cincinnati & Muskingum Valley (CMV) and CA&C, and predecessors of the N&W such as the Wheeling & Lake Erie, offered good connections to Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Cincinnati markets. Ohio governmental reports from the 1910s and 1920s indicate the Z&W was serving over 100 on-line active coal shippers (see links at the end of this article). Of course, some of these mines were very small, only originating a few cars weekly.
*** Page 10 *** FOLLOWING NEEDS WORK
CS&H Statistics - Poor’s Railroad Manual - 1894 In the years before securities regulation laws, Poor’s Railroad Manuals (a predecessor to today’s Standard & Poor’s investor services) published basic information about publicly-traded railroads. Key statistics for the Columbus, Shawnee & Hocking Ry. as of consolidation with the Sandusky Short Line on December 23, 1893, included the following: Total owned and leased lines at June 30, 1893 - 162.03 miles Rolling Stock: 29 locomotives, 13 passenger coaches, 3 baggage cars, 275 box cars, 153 flat cars, 2173 coal hoppers, 18 cabooses, 30 miscellaneous cars Annual gross revenue: $768,000
Last Days of the Z&W
Following the T&OC absorption into the New York Central in 1922, the Z&W was kept intact and continued to be run as part of the T&OC and eventually the NYC system. The T&OC abandoned the Redfield and San Toy branches at some point in the 1930s after the coalmines there played out. The Central also eventually abandoned the portion of the Z&W Shawnee line between Crooksville and Congo. The T&OC’s Buckingham Branch between Glouster and Drakes allowed the NYC to reach Shawnee and the still-active mines up at Congo and along the branch without maintaining the rail connection and crumbling tunnel between Corning and Drakes. I recall from my time working on the T&OC seeing the barely-visible remnants of the weed-covered Z&W right of way, including a lonely gray lichen-covered wooden crossbuck at what must have been a highway grade crossing north of Rendville. The abutments of the bridge across Sunday Creek in Corning, where the Z&W swung across the T&OC and off to the west through the Corning Tunnel, are still visible just down hill from St. Bernard’s church.
After being cut off at its west end, old Z&W main from Truro up to East Columbus served on for another six decades as the T&OC’s East Columbus Branch. This line continued to have a wealth of active shippers mostly feeding the home building boom as Columbus expanded eastward in the postwar years up through the 1960s, with the territory north of East Columbus eventually being served from the Panhandle from Yard A after the Penn Central merger in 1968. But eventually all that ended.
The 37.1 miles of Z&W between Thurston (Z&W Milepost 28.8, the distance from Columbus) via Fultonham to Zanesville (MP 67.9) was still in service as the NYC’s “Z&W Secondary Track.” when I worked on the T&OC lines in the 1960s. A portion of the Z&W’s former Shawnee Branch between Fultonham and Crooksville also survived as the NYC “Crooksville Running Track” in that era. There were switching jobs for which NYC crews reported, per our Employee Time Table, at Fultonham and Roseville or Crooksville. Old-time railroaders I knew then referred to a Z&W engine house at East Fultonham, but I cannot find any surviving evidence of this. Steam engines in this territory could have been supported by the big roundhouses at West Columbus or Corning (both 50-60 miles distant) for heavy repair service, but would have needed local routine service facilities somewhere around Thurston or Fultonham for daily inspection, lubrication, fire grate and smoke box shake-out, sand and the like.
I recall the Z&W heading east from Thurston as a grass-covered line with rusty rails running between bright green brushy walls of black locust and wild cherry trees. Thurston was once a teeming junction between the Z&W Columbus-Zanesville line and the T&OC’s Corning-Toledo Eastern Branch. But it was rapidly eroding before our eyes in the 1960s. The track near the old crossing of the Z&W and Eastern Branch where the passenger station once stood had been re-routed to provide more of a high-speed straight shot for T&OC Columbus-Corning trains so they could pass well south of the former Z&W diamond on a very gentle curve past Thurston Tower. After that reconfiguration, the Z&W line branched off the Eastern at a wye a hundred yards north of the local grain elevator, next to a stub siding holding little-used track maintenance equipment and a handful of decomposing bad-order cars. Now, five decades later, every trace of the Z&W east of Thurston is gone except a stretch retained by the Mt. Perry-based Z&W Scenic Railway between Fultonham (Z&W MP 56.2) or Glass Rock (MP 45.7) and the stub of the old PRR CM&V line south from Zanesville.
*** Page 11 ***
The line east of Thurston is best remembered as the Zanesville & Western Railway Co., or Z&W, the name it held from 1902 onward. It eventually was designated as the Z&W branch of the T&OC, which in turn was acquired by the New York Central, which became the Penn-Central and eventually Conrail. Its final abandonment and removal in large part occurred in the 1980s when it was part of Conrail.
After 1903 the Ohio Central was running all passenger trains via South Columbus and Truro to Thurston, and from there south to Bremen toward Corning and Hobson. From that point, it appears the Z&W only operated in its own name east of Thurston. There is no evidence in Official Railway Guides that the Z&W ever advertised any direct no-change trains from Columbus to Zanesville. However, after 1903 the T&OC was showing Columbus-Zanesville service via its West Broad Street station, with connections onto the Z&W at Thurston.
Working on the Z&W
As a brakeman working off the T&OC extra board from West Columbus in the 1960s, I occasionally rode NYC through freight and local trains over about a quarter of the Z&W’s original lines in Columbus and to the east and down into Perry County. I will not repeat lengthier details here -- please refer to the “East Columbus Local” and “T&OC Trains South from Columbus” articles at the Columbus Railroads Steam Railroads NYC site for accounts of what it was like to ride the Local and T&OC through trains over this line.The East Columbus Local switched out the Landmark elevator at Truro, which in the 1960s had a much more extensive rail layout that it does today, plus shippers on the T&OC Western Branch between Bannon and Truro, including the old Buchsieb slaughterhouse just east of Alum Creek. The Local also served a dozen or so active points up the branch to Woodland Avenue. This made for a long hard day’s work, but a rewarding one as the crew would do virtually every physical railroading maneuver that was legal in the State of Ohio, and perhaps a few that were questionable. My favorite was a gravity drop with the train at the Alum Creek bridge. After setting up the Barneby-Cheney works at Cassady Avenue (today Calgon Carbon), which had west-facing points, we would switch the caboose onto the front end of the train, and then pull the locomotive in the clear up the Barneby lead. We would bleed off all the air brakes on the caboose and train, and let everything roll downhill across Alum Creek, using hand brakes to stop short of Nelson road on the west side, then pull the engine out and couple onto the rear (east) end of the train, cut in the air and recharge the brakes. Next we would crawl caboose-first across Nelson and Sunbury Roads, hand-flagging the streets with the conductor Mr. Prenkert tweeting “long/long/short/long” grade-crossing signals on the high-pitched air whistle on the rear brake stanchion, possibly exciting a few robins. The remaining Branch work at the McNally and Blain lumber yards, Albers warehouse and several other shippers near Leonard Avenue, as well as the return trip to Truro, required the engine to be on the east end.
*** Page 9 *** The East Columbus Branch above Truro all the way to Woodland Avenue boasted a well-drained right-of-way, moderately graded except for a dramatic “dip” at Alum Creek, with well-ballasted new ties, and, it appeared, our standard New York Central 127-lb. “road” rail rather than the smaller NYC 105-lb. “yard” rail. This was in sharp contrast with some other remote NYC lines like the St. Marys Branch, which in places had decrepit 90-lb. rail from the 1890s sitting atop rotting 40-year old ties. Some regulars working on the Branch said at some point the NYC decided to give it a serious fix-up, and invested in its longer-term condition. With that big rail and good ballast, carrying only the weekday Local with her light SW7s and GP9s moving at 15 miles per hour, and short mixed freight trains seldom including heavy mineral loads, the branch would have lasted forever with little need for preventative maintenance.
The Z&W in Its Heyday
By a number of historical accounts, the Z&W offered the preferred passenger service from Columbus Union Depot to Zanesville, covering the 67 miles in two and a half hours in the 1890s. (Columbus-Zanesvile passenger service was also available on the PRR via Trinway, the B&O via Newark, and by the Columbus, Newark & Zanesville interurban line.) The last several miles up into Zanesville ran over the tracks of the Zanesville Belt & Terminal Railroad, an interesting combination of rights of way resulting from one of the many rail reorganizations in the first decade of the 20th Century. The complex of tracks and interchanges of the four bigger lines serving Zanesville and its immediate surroundings during that era was extensive.
While the Z&W main line between Truro and Thurston was well-engineered, flat and largely devoid of curvature, the routes through Perry and Muskingum Counties were almost all curves and cuts. Veteran Z&W crews joked that the Shawnee line was so curvy that an engineer could reach out his cab window and shake hands with the conductor on the caboose. Surviving folklore also suggests the tracks were not well maintained, leading local people to call the Z&W as the “Zigzag & Wobble”. This legend inspired composition of a very nice bluegrass tune by the same name. Click here for a link to a Perry County band that does an excellent rendition of Zigzag and Wobble.
The Z&W’s economic lifeblood was obviously hauling coal to Columbus and the its interchange railroads near Zanesville. These lines, including the B&O, PRR precursors Cincinnati & Muskingum Valley (CMV) and CA&C, and predecessors of the N&W such as the Wheeling & Lake Erie, offered good connections to Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Cincinnati markets. Ohio governmental reports from the 1910s and 1920s indicate the Z&W was serving over 100 on-line active coal shippers (see links at the end of this article). Of course, some of these mines were very small, only originating a few cars weekly.
*** Page 10 *** FOLLOWING NEEDS WORK
CS&H Statistics - Poor’s Railroad Manual - 1894 In the years before securities regulation laws, Poor’s Railroad Manuals (a predecessor to today’s Standard & Poor’s investor services) published basic information about publicly-traded railroads. Key statistics for the Columbus, Shawnee & Hocking Ry. as of consolidation with the Sandusky Short Line on December 23, 1893, included the following: Total owned and leased lines at June 30, 1893 - 162.03 miles Rolling Stock: 29 locomotives, 13 passenger coaches, 3 baggage cars, 275 box cars, 153 flat cars, 2173 coal hoppers, 18 cabooses, 30 miscellaneous cars Annual gross revenue: $768,000
Last Days of the Z&W
Following the T&OC absorption into the New York Central in 1922, the Z&W was kept intact and continued to be run as part of the T&OC and eventually the NYC system. The T&OC abandoned the Redfield and San Toy branches at some point in the 1930s after the coalmines there played out. The Central also eventually abandoned the portion of the Z&W Shawnee line between Crooksville and Congo. The T&OC’s Buckingham Branch between Glouster and Drakes allowed the NYC to reach Shawnee and the still-active mines up at Congo and along the branch without maintaining the rail connection and crumbling tunnel between Corning and Drakes. I recall from my time working on the T&OC seeing the barely-visible remnants of the weed-covered Z&W right of way, including a lonely gray lichen-covered wooden crossbuck at what must have been a highway grade crossing north of Rendville. The abutments of the bridge across Sunday Creek in Corning, where the Z&W swung across the T&OC and off to the west through the Corning Tunnel, are still visible just down hill from St. Bernard’s church.
After being cut off at its west end, old Z&W main from Truro up to East Columbus served on for another six decades as the T&OC’s East Columbus Branch. This line continued to have a wealth of active shippers mostly feeding the home building boom as Columbus expanded eastward in the postwar years up through the 1960s, with the territory north of East Columbus eventually being served from the Panhandle from Yard A after the Penn Central merger in 1968. But eventually all that ended.
The 37.1 miles of Z&W between Thurston (Z&W Milepost 28.8, the distance from Columbus) via Fultonham to Zanesville (MP 67.9) was still in service as the NYC’s “Z&W Secondary Track.” when I worked on the T&OC lines in the 1960s. A portion of the Z&W’s former Shawnee Branch between Fultonham and Crooksville also survived as the NYC “Crooksville Running Track” in that era. There were switching jobs for which NYC crews reported, per our Employee Time Table, at Fultonham and Roseville or Crooksville. Old-time railroaders I knew then referred to a Z&W engine house at East Fultonham, but I cannot find any surviving evidence of this. Steam engines in this territory could have been supported by the big roundhouses at West Columbus or Corning (both 50-60 miles distant) for heavy repair service, but would have needed local routine service facilities somewhere around Thurston or Fultonham for daily inspection, lubrication, fire grate and smoke box shake-out, sand and the like.
I recall the Z&W heading east from Thurston as a grass-covered line with rusty rails running between bright green brushy walls of black locust and wild cherry trees. Thurston was once a teeming junction between the Z&W Columbus-Zanesville line and the T&OC’s Corning-Toledo Eastern Branch. But it was rapidly eroding before our eyes in the 1960s. The track near the old crossing of the Z&W and Eastern Branch where the passenger station once stood had been re-routed to provide more of a high-speed straight shot for T&OC Columbus-Corning trains so they could pass well south of the former Z&W diamond on a very gentle curve past Thurston Tower. After that reconfiguration, the Z&W line branched off the Eastern at a wye a hundred yards north of the local grain elevator, next to a stub siding holding little-used track maintenance equipment and a handful of decomposing bad-order cars. Now, five decades later, every trace of the Z&W east of Thurston is gone except a stretch retained by the Mt. Perry-based Z&W Scenic Railway between Fultonham (Z&W MP 56.2) or Glass Rock (MP 45.7) and the stub of the old PRR CM&V line south from Zanesville.
*** Page 11 ***
CS&H Statistics - Poor’s Railroad Manual - 1894 In the years before securities regulation laws, Poor’s Railroad Manuals (a predecessor to today’s Standard & Poor’s investor services) published basic information about publicly-traded railroads. Key statistics for the Columbus, Shawnee & Hocking Ry. as of consolidation with the Sandusky Short Line on December 23, 1893, included the following: Total owned and leased lines at June 30, 1893 - 162.03 miles Rolling Stock: 29 locomotives, 13 passenger coaches, 3 baggage cars, 275 box cars, 153 flat cars, 2173 coal hoppers, 18 cabooses, 30 miscellaneous cars Annual gross revenue: $768,000
Last Days of the Z&W
Following the T&OC absorption into the New York Central in 1922, the Z&W was kept intact and continued to be run as part of the T&OC and eventually the NYC system. The T&OC abandoned the Redfield and San Toy branches at some point in the 1930s after the coalmines there played out. The Central also eventually abandoned the portion of the Z&W Shawnee line between Crooksville and Congo. The T&OC’s Buckingham Branch between Glouster and Drakes allowed the NYC to reach Shawnee and the still-active mines up at Congo and along the branch without maintaining the rail connection and crumbling tunnel between Corning and Drakes. I recall from my time working on the T&OC seeing the barely-visible remnants of the weed-covered Z&W right of way, including a lonely gray lichen-covered wooden crossbuck at what must have been a highway grade crossing north of Rendville. The abutments of the bridge across Sunday Creek in Corning, where the Z&W swung across the T&OC and off to the west through the Corning Tunnel, are still visible just down hill from St. Bernard’s church.After being cut off at its west end, old Z&W main from Truro up to East Columbus served on for another six decades as the T&OC’s East Columbus Branch. This line continued to have a wealth of active shippers mostly feeding the home building boom as Columbus expanded eastward in the postwar years up through the 1960s, with the territory north of East Columbus eventually being served from the Panhandle from Yard A after the Penn Central merger in 1968. But eventually all that ended.
The 37.1 miles of Z&W between Thurston (Z&W Milepost 28.8, the distance from Columbus) via Fultonham to Zanesville (MP 67.9) was still in service as the NYC’s “Z&W Secondary Track.” when I worked on the T&OC lines in the 1960s. A portion of the Z&W’s former Shawnee Branch between Fultonham and Crooksville also survived as the NYC “Crooksville Running Track” in that era. There were switching jobs for which NYC crews reported, per our Employee Time Table, at Fultonham and Roseville or Crooksville. Old-time railroaders I knew then referred to a Z&W engine house at East Fultonham, but I cannot find any surviving evidence of this. Steam engines in this territory could have been supported by the big roundhouses at West Columbus or Corning (both 50-60 miles distant) for heavy repair service, but would have needed local routine service facilities somewhere around Thurston or Fultonham for daily inspection, lubrication, fire grate and smoke box shake-out, sand and the like.
I recall the Z&W heading east from Thurston as a grass-covered line with rusty rails running between bright green brushy walls of black locust and wild cherry trees. Thurston was once a teeming junction between the Z&W Columbus-Zanesville line and the T&OC’s Corning-Toledo Eastern Branch. But it was rapidly eroding before our eyes in the 1960s. The track near the old crossing of the Z&W and Eastern Branch where the passenger station once stood had been re-routed to provide more of a high-speed straight shot for T&OC Columbus-Corning trains so they could pass well south of the former Z&W diamond on a very gentle curve past Thurston Tower. After that reconfiguration, the Z&W line branched off the Eastern at a wye a hundred yards north of the local grain elevator, next to a stub siding holding little-used track maintenance equipment and a handful of decomposing bad-order cars. Now, five decades later, every trace of the Z&W east of Thurston is gone except a stretch retained by the Mt. Perry-based Z&W Scenic Railway between Fultonham (Z&W MP 56.2) or Glass Rock (MP 45.7) and the stub of the old PRR CM&V line south from Zanesville.