Hocking Valley Scenic Railway: Ohio's Coal Road Lives On

Nelsonville sits at the edge of the Hocking Hills in southeastern Ohio, and on weekends and holidays a train rolls out of here that has been rolling, in one form or another, for more than a hundred and fifty years. The Hocking Valley Scenic Railway carries passengers through the wooded hills along a corridor that was once one of the busiest coal-hauling lines in the state, a route whose history is inseparable from the industrial transformation of Ohio.

The original railroad was chartered in April of eighteen sixty-four as the Mineral Rail Road, with the explicit purpose of getting coal and iron ore out of the Hocking Valley and into Columbus. Construction began in earnest in eighteen sixty-seven, when the company renamed itself the Columbus and Hocking Valley Railroad. By August of eighteen sixty-nine the first freight train from Nelsonville reached Columbus, and within a year passenger service ran all the way to Athens. The valley's coal was fueling factories, powering steamboats, and feeding furnaces across central Ohio.

The Nelsonville train yard became the operational heart of the line. At its peak it was the seventh largest rail yard in the country, with thirty-two tracks managing the constant flow of loaded and empty cars. The railroad grew through mergers and name changes until it became simply the Hocking Valley Railway in eighteen ninety-nine. Contemporary observers called it the Buckeye Route and Columbus's railroad, the largest independent line operating entirely within Ohio. In nineteen thirty, it was absorbed by the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway and became the Hocking Division.

Freight traffic declined over the mid-twentieth century, and the line through Nelsonville went quiet in the early nineteen eighties. A group of volunteers organized in nineteen seventy-two to save what remained. They formed the nonprofit that became the Hocking Valley Scenic Railway, restored vintage equipment, and began operating over twelve miles of the original corridor, all of which sits within a section of track designated a historic district on the National Register of Historic Places.

Today the railway runs steam and diesel locomotives through scenery that has changed little since the coal trains rolled. The Nelsonville depot and the surrounding hills offer a genuine window into Appalachian Ohio's industrial past.