C&O in Cincinnati: Part One: Stevens Yard and Cheviot Yard, The

Chesapeake and Ohio Historical Magazine, Jun 1999

Editor's Note: Since we will meet in Cincinnati for the C&OHS Annual Conference, this month's feature reprints material about the two C&O yards that bracketed the city, as they were in 1955. The following is additional background on C&O operations in and around Cincinnati.

Cincinnati was an important terminal for the C&O, but the railroad had no major facilities in the center city. This is partly because the C&O arrived at the Queen City fairly late in the development of railroading there. It also was not a strong line at the time, having just emerged from a reorganization that stopped just short of bankruptcy. When C&O built the Cincinnati Division down the Kentucky side of the Ohio River from Ashland in 1888-89, and crossed the river on a massive bridge completed in the last year of Collis P. Huntington's control of the line, it attained, at last, the western connections which it had so long lacked, and it finally could boast of having become a "trunk line" instead of a regional Virginias carrier. Since funds weren't available to install major facilities in Cincinnati proper in the early years, yards were established in Covington, Kentucky, just across the river, in connection with the Kentucky Central (later L&N). The close association with L&N continued for years into the future with L&N using the C&O bridge across the Ohio.

Later, as traffic increased and the Covington facility was no longer suitable, a large yard was established at Silver Grove, Kentucky, about 12 miles east of the city. Here plenty of land was available for a long, multitrack yard with attendant engine house and service facilities. The yard installed here was named for the long-time C&O President, George W. Stevens, and was completed in 1912.

In 1910 C&O had acquired the Chicago, Cincinnati & Louisville railroad running diagonally across Indiana, and established its Cincinnati terminal on the northwest side of the city at Cheviot, about seven miles from the downtown area.

A single hump at Stevens was used to classify eastbound traffic (westbound traffic for Cincinnati and beyond was classified at Russell). Total track length in the new yard was 35.06 miles, and facilities included a 13-stall roundhouse with an 85-foot turntable. Because the yard was in a relatively rural and isolated point, the C&O built a 100-room hotel for its employees, and for many years ran a special employees' passenger train between Cincinnati and Stevens to ferry workers back and forth. A 100-foot turntable was added in 1921, and in the late 1940s Stevens Yard was an important classification yard for the C&O's hottest manifest freights, the Speedwest and the Expediter. In 1955 the yard was given a major face lift. It is from this renovation that the following article appeared in Tracks magazine. At its height in 1927, some 425 employees worked at Stevens, 325 in mechanical, and 100 in train service. The facility was taken out of service in the early 1980s.

Cheviot remained the terminal for freight moving over the Chicago Division, and there were always numerous transfer run freights operating between the two yards, picking up and setting out within Cincinnati. All this was a colorful and essentially inefficient operation, which was replaced entirely by the establishment of Queensgate Yard.

Once Chessie System had been established and had assumed B&O operations, and L&N in the area was consolidated with the formation of CSX, the whole operation was concentrated in what had once been B&O property. Queensgate is now one of the busiest and most important yards on the CSXT system. The accompanying photos and excerpt from the Tracks article will show some of the operations at Stevens and Cheviot in the late steam and early diesel period.