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Nickel Plate Road (Railroad): Map, History, Rosters

Last revised: October 28, 2026

By: Adam Burns

In More Classic American Railroads, Mike Schafer tells where the New York, Chicago & St. Louis got the name people actually used. A Norwalk, Ohio newspaper, pleased with the new construction, called it a “double-track nickel-plated railroad.” The Nickel Plate Road stuck. The plant was built to that standard, and the speed was real. After the Second World War the line showed it. The Pennsylvania, the New York Central, and the Baltimore & Ohio sometimes moved their own trains onto it, flagships among them, when they wanted a fast road across the Middle West. Few branches, and a passenger business that stayed modest, were part of how the property made money in years when many larger railroads were struggling. After the Wheeling & Lake Erie lease the system stood at about 2,266 miles, from Buffalo and Chicago to St. Louis and the Ohio coal and steel country.

John A. Rehor, in The Nickel Plate Story, puts the gross from 1945 to the merger at $2.8 billion and the profits at $250 million. Steam locomotives built since 1900 are a separate roster. The quantity column there is 786. The diesel roster counts 440 locomotives, each frame once. Much of the main line is still in use under Norfolk Southern.

PA-1s led by No. 190 have the “Nickel Plate Limited,” Chicago to Buffalo, at Hammond, Indiana, on April 1, 1956. That locomotive was scrapped. The engine that runs as 190 is a replica on Santa Fe 62L, outside the eleven PA-1s the railroad owned. Doyle McCormack nearly completed the restoration across 21 years, and in 2023 the locomotive went to Genesee Valley Transportation. Gordon Lloyd photo.

On this page: At a glance · The Seney syndicate · Built in a year · Vanderbilt, then the Van Sweringens · The Greater Nickel Plate · Davin, the Wheeling, and the Berkshires · Passenger trains · Norfolk & Western

At a glance

The Seney syndicate

The original Buffalo–Chicago line was conceived, surveyed, and built with private capital. The closest comparison is the Virginian, which Henry Huttleston Rogers built into the southern Appalachian coal fields. The Nickel Plate began with the Seney syndicate: George Seney, and with him John Martin, Edward Lyman, Alexander White, Watson Brown, Calvin Brice, Charles Foster, Dan Eells, General Samuel Thomas, Columbus Cummings, and William Howard. They were lawyers and Wall Street men, and by 1880 they already controlled the East Tennessee, Virginia & Georgia, the Peoria, Decatur & Evansville, and the Ohio Central, something like 2,500 miles among them. They also had the Lake Erie & Western, then about 353 miles from Fremont, Ohio, to Bloomington, Illinois. A railroad already in hand was one thing. A new trunk line beside William Vanderbilt’s Lake Shore was a different bet. The syndicate was stepping into the same contest as Vanderbilt, Gould, and Harriman, and the money was still its own.

Taylor Hampton, in The Nickel Plate Road, repeats the story that Seney and William Vanderbilt disliked each other, and that Seney asked Watson Brown whether a new railroad beside the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern would even the score. Rehor is more practical. The syndicate had to grow past the Lake Erie & Western if it meant to stay in the game. On February 3, 1881, the group organized the New York, Chicago & St. Louis Railway Company to connect Cleveland and Chicago. The capitalization was $14,666,666.66, set down before the new line had a mile of track open. A St. Louis branch was in the prospectus. So was a line to New York, or to some other point on the Atlantic. The salt water never came. St. Louis took another forty years. Within months an extension from Cleveland to Buffalo was added, about 185 miles and another parallel to the Lake Shore, and the capitalization went to $35 million.

Built in a year

The Baltimore & Ohio, the Pennsylvania, and the New York Central were already in Chicago, and they were settled across the Middle West. Many of the famous railroads had taken decades to piece a system together. The Nickel Plate was finished in a single year. The surveyors’ Cleveland–Chicago line was about 340 miles, some 15 miles shorter than the Lake Shore, and the syndicate meant the new road to be built to a standard that line would have to respect. Cash was on hand, and much of the survey work was already done, so the gangs went out at once. In the summer of 1881 about 10,000 men were at work along a 523-mile corridor. Not all of it was new. In September 1880 the syndicate bought the Frankfort & Kokomo, 25 miles. The abandoned Wabash & Erie Canal offered a towpath from Largo to the Ohio line. The defunct Tiffin & Fort Wayne Rail Road left more than 100 miles of unused grade.

Construction started west from Arcadia, Ohio, where the new line met the Lake Erie & Western. Rails reached McComb on June 22, 1881, and for a time the gangs laid about a mile a day. The first train entered Fort Wayne on November 3. Another crew worked east from a point six miles west of Hobart, Indiana. The two met at Sidney, Indiana, on April 5, 1882. East of Fostoria, Bellevue, later the great yard, was reached before the end of 1881. By then some 270 miles, more than half the main line, were in. Track reached Brocton, New York, in March 1882. The last 50 miles into Buffalo were built with the Buffalo, Pittsburgh & Western, a Pennsylvania subsidiary. The Nickel Plate laid a second track on that stretch. The Pennsylvania used the eastbound main. The Nickel Plate used the westbound. The two companies shared that entrance for the rest of the Nickel Plate’s life. By the spring of 1882 the western crews were closing on Chicago. Hammond and Grand Crossing came in August, with connections to the Illinois Central, the Lake Shore, and the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne & Chicago.

The Nickel Plate Road logo. Author’s work.

After the ballast and the telegraph, the New York, Chicago & St. Louis opened on October 23, 1882. Sixteen months, and a new Midwestern railroad. The speed of it caught the large roads. None of them had stopped the work. The Pennsylvania, a partner on the last miles into Buffalo, looked on and let the line be built. Vanderbilt waited to see whether it would actually open. When it did, he criticized it, and then he bought it. Seney’s group said in public that it would not sell. The syndicate’s money was strained. On October 26, 1882, three days after the first trains, the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern bought the property for $7.205 million.

Vanderbilt, then the Van Sweringens

The Vanderbilt years were a compromise the New York Central never much liked. The Nickel Plate had cost real money, and it had a main line worth running. Leaving it to rot would have wasted the purchase. Letting it succeed would have put a competitor on the Central’s own ground. Some work was done in the early years of the new century. Bridges were improved, automatic block signals went in, 80-pound rail was laid, and new roundhouses were built. The betterments helped. They did not carry the traffic the line was capable of. The Nickel Plate stayed a spare corridor through country the Central already served, and it stayed a thorn. An independent company on that alignment could have made the Central’s service miserable. The way out was a buyer from outside the railroad business.

The buyers were Oris Paxton Van Sweringen and Mantis James Van Sweringen. They had started in Cleveland real estate in 1905, done well at it, and were developing Shaker Heights. They wanted a rapid-transit entrance to the city. The Nickel Plate’s east-west line through Cleveland was the path. They put up every bit of collateral they had, scraped together $2 million as a down payment, and on July 5, 1916, gained control. They had come from real estate. On the Nickel Plate they became highly regarded railroad men. John J. Bernet, the operating man they put in charge, gave the property the reputation it kept: fast freight, maintained, and run on time. The slogan that fit it was High Speed Service.

The Greater Nickel Plate

The brothers came close to a fifth eastern trunk line, through control of the Nickel Plate, the Chesapeake & Ohio, the Erie, and the Pere Marquette, and through a merger that would have made the four one railroad. The system would have covered about 9,213 route miles in the United States and another 337 in southern Ontario: the Nickel Plate’s speed, the Erie’s double track from Chicago to Jersey City, and the Chesapeake & Ohio’s coal from the southern Appalachians to tidewater. The projected operating revenues were $340 million a year, behind only the Pennsylvania and the New York Central. Until then the brothers had a strong name in financial circles, heavy debt and all, and a good standing at the Interstate Commerce Commission. The Vaness Company, a stock trust and one of several corporations they had formed, was meant to stay quiet. In theory they could sell the rail shares and still hold the system. A minority of Chesapeake & Ohio stockholders found the arrangement. The standing at the Commission went with the discovery. The brothers lost the reputation they had carried, and the Greater Nickel Plate collapsed.

What they did assemble, they assembled in 1922 and 1923, and both properties became part of the railroad people meant when they said Nickel Plate. The Lake Erie & Western had stayed with the New York Central after the 1882 sale. By the time the brothers wanted it, the road reached about 718 miles, Sandusky to Peoria, with north-south lines from Michigan City to Indianapolis and from Fort Wayne toward Rushville and Connersville. They took it on April 26, 1922. A month earlier, in March 1922, they secured the Toledo, St. Louis & Western, the Clover Leaf Route, a former narrow-gauge line of about 450 miles from Toledo to East St. Louis. The St. Louis connection written into the 1881 prospectus arrived with that railroad. On April 11, 1923, the three railroads were consolidated into the New York, Chicago & St. Louis Railroad. The nickname did not change.

An official 1940 system map of the Nickel Plate Road. Author’s collection.

The 1920s were prosperous years, and even then the industry and the Interstate Commerce Commission were drawing plans for a smaller East. The talk was of three or four large systems, with New England left aside. The Baltimore & Ohio, the New York Central, and the Pennsylvania all jockeyed for the pieces. The Van Sweringens came the closest to building one. Just before the Depression they revived the Greater Nickel Plate: the Nickel Plate, the Chesapeake & Ohio east of Cincinnati, the Lackawanna, the Pere Marquette, and a handful of short lines. The Commission approved that version. The stock-market crash of October 1929 ended it. In 1932 a last four-system plan was put forward, and the weak economy killed that too. The crash was the brothers’ end on the property. As the banks failed they were forced out, and in 1935 they lost control of the Nickel Plate and much of the rest of the empire.

Davin, the Wheeling, and the Berkshires

The railroad missed receivership, which few of its size managed, and the recovery was strong enough that the company paid its outstanding debts in full. Few railroads of that decade could say the same. The start was bleak. The loss in 1932 was more than $4.4 million. A loan of $18.1 million from the Reconstruction Finance Corporation kept the gates open. Traffic turned in the spring of 1933, and the operating ratio came down from 75 percent to 59 percent. The year 1934 showed a small profit, the first in three years. The rest of the decade kept improving. A deficit in 1938 was the break in that run. A stronger economy did part of the work. The railroad did the rest, on its own plant: rail heavier than 100 pounds to the yard, faster schedules, and a new freight engine. The 2-8-4s, eighty Berkshires built for the Nickel Plate, are on the steam roster. The thirty-two former Wheeling engines are a separate class. Centralized traffic control began in January 1942.

In the 1940s the Nickel Plate had its own presidency again. After the Van Sweringen collapse it had remained under common management with the Chesapeake & Ohio and the Pere Marquette. That ended on December 15, 1942, when the board elected John Davin president. He was from Montgomery, West Virginia, he had spent his career on the Chesapeake & Ohio, and he kept the efficient management the property had come to expect. He died on January 7, 1949. The year he left behind, 1948, was the railroad’s greatest to that point: operating revenues of $109.4 million.

Stock control of the Wheeling & Lake Erie came while he was president, in 1946 and 1947, after the Interstate Commerce Commission authorized the Nickel Plate to acquire the Chesapeake & Ohio’s holdings, about 80 percent of the Wheeling. The lease itself is dated December 1, 1949, for 99 years, after his death. The Wheeling was about 530 miles: Toledo to Wheeling, Cleveland to Zanesville, and branches to Huron and Lorain. It handled coal, coke, steel, and general merchandise, sat in the middle of industrial Ohio, reached the northern steel mills of West Virginia, and offered a path toward the automobile plants at Detroit. The mileage fit the Nickel Plate’s map. The leased miles put the system at about 2,266. It was a lease. The Wheeling kept its own corporate life, and the Nickel Plate took the operation.

An official 1950 system map of the Nickel Plate Road. The Wheeling & Lake Erie, leased on December 1, 1949, is on the map. Author’s collection.

Dieselization was slower than the builders hoped. In 1948 Electro-Motive sent an F3 set to be tested, and the builder tried again with the F7. No F unit was purchased. The railroad’s answer was ten more Berkshires, the S-3s, built by Lima-Hamilton. No. 779 was that builder’s last steam locomotive. An order for four BL1s had already been canceled, in July 1947. At the speeds the Nickel Plate ran, the fuel saving of a covered wagon against a Berkshire was thin, and the mechanical department disliked a cab with no view to the rear. Through the late 1940s the only passenger cab units on the roster were eleven PA-1s, in Bluebird blue and light grey, on the Nickel Plate Limited, the City of Chicago, and the City of Cleveland. The work still assigned to steam faded, the later road switchers offered the rearward view the mechanical department wanted, and the diesels took the road. Through the 1950s the RS11s, the GP7s, and the GP9s arrived, and the Berkshires left the main line. The last of those runs was Berkshire 746, Bellevue to Conneaut, on July 2, 1958. A few 0-8-0s were still switching the Conneaut ore dock in the spring of 1959. The steam roster was clear in 1960. Nos. 755, 757, 759, and 765 were kept.

The locomotive photographs from those years sit on the steam and diesel rosters, and together they are a portrait of the railroad. A Berkshire on a fast freight at Hammond, past WV Tower, was the main line doing what it had been built to do. On the leased Wheeling, engines of the same wheel arrangement took water at Dillonvale and worked the line near Scio. The Scio line was later abandoned. Mikados and switchers covered the rest of the freight work.

Passenger trains

The passenger business was modest on purpose, and the modesty was one reason the railroad made money. The Nickel Plate kept an unpretentious service and left the long-distance passenger plant to the New York Central. When it opened, Chicago trains used the Illinois Central and Michigan Central’s Great Central Depot on Lake Street, and Buffalo trains used the Erie’s Exchange Street Depot. The Chicago arrangement did not last. On May 1, 1883, the connection moved to the Lake Shore and Rock Island’s Van Buren Street station. La Salle Street Station, a plainer building, replaced that terminal in 1903 and remained the Nickel Plate’s Chicago station for the rest of the company’s life. In Buffalo the trains moved to the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western’s Lackawanna Terminal soon after it opened in March 1917. The showpiece was Cleveland Union Terminal, the ornate 52-story complex opened on January 1, 1928, after six years of work, built by the New York Central and the Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago & St. Louis, the Big Four, and shared with the Nickel Plate. Rehor describes 17.1 miles of overhead electrification at 3,000 volts, from the Central’s Collinwood Yard to Linndale. The whole terminal project, at $179 million, included two suburban stations, a rapid-transit line, and the commercial buildings. Headquarters sat in Terminal Tower.

The trains themselves were a short list. The Nickel Plate Limited ran Chicago–Buffalo. So did the City of Chicago, the City of Cleveland, the New Yorker, and the Westerner. The Blue Arrow and the Blue Dart ran between Cleveland and St. Louis. The Commercial Traveler ran Toledo–St. Louis. The eleven PA-1s, 180–190, drew the late stream of that service. Every original frame was scrapped. An August 1952 timetable is on this site.

Norfolk & Western

The 1950s were still good years, and the costs and the competition were rising with everyone else’s. They were the last years in which a railroad of the Nickel Plate’s size could assume it would stay single. Piggyback began on July 12, 1954, between Cleveland and Chicago. The trials worked, and the trailer-on-flatcar trains then ran through to Buffalo and New York with connecting lines. A recession in 1957 and 1958 was a nuisance, and it pointed at the larger question. A fast and profitable railroad of that size had to find a place once the East started combining. The Pennsylvania and the New York Central announced that they meant to join. The Lackawanna and the Erie formed the Erie Lackawanna on October 17, 1960. The Norfolk & Western was looking for a way to carry its coal traffic farther into the Middle West, and the Nickel Plate was the opening.

The Interstate Commerce Commission approved the marriage on April 17, 1963, after years of negotiations, hearings, and planning. The package also took in the Wabash, the Pittsburgh & West Virginia, and the Akron, Canton & Youngstown. Coal from the Norfolk & Western met the Nickel Plate’s and the Wabash’s gates in the Middle West, and the combined railroad reached tidewater. Independent operation ended with the close of October 15, 1964. At 12:01 a.m. on October 16 the Norfolk & Western absorbed the Nickel Plate and assumed the Wheeling & Lake Erie lease. The Wabash was leased at the same moment. The Berkshires and the Bluebird PAs were already gone. What remained was the railroad Seney’s surveyors had laid out: a fast double-track line across the Middle West, still worth running.

Norfolk & Western GP30 No. 2901, formerly Nickel Plate 901, and Norfolk & Western SD45 No. 1707 at the former Wabash engine terminal in Decatur, Illinois, circa 1967. The SD45 was Norfolk & Western power. Photographer unknown. American-Rails.com collection.

Sources

• Mike Schafer, More Classic American Railroads. The Norwalk newspaper and the nickel-plated compliment.
• John A. Rehor, The Nickel Plate Story. The $2.8 billion gross and $250 million in profits, 1945–1964, the Depression recovery, the Cleveland terminal, and the shape of the modern railroad.
• Taylor Hampton, The Nickel Plate Road: The History of a Great Railroad. The Seney syndicate and the building of the line.

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45. Indiana Harbor Belt Diesel Roster (All-Time)

    Oct 25, 26 12:17 AM

    
    All-time diesel roster of the Indiana Harbor Belt. 202 locomotive frames, each counted once. NW2s, SW7s, SW1500s, road switchers, and gensets. Slugs and boosters are outside the count.

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46. Indiana Harbor Belt Steam Roster (Built Since 1900)

    Oct 25, 26 12:13 AM

    
    Steam locomotives of the Indiana Harbor Belt built since 1900. 182 engines, each counted once. 0-6-0s, 2-6-0s, 0-8-0s, and 2-8-2s. The three U-4a switchers are three-cylinder Brooks engines of 1927.

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47. Indiana Harbor Belt Railroad: Map, Rosters, History

    Oct 25, 26 12:00 AM

    
    Indiana Harbor Belt, the inner belt across the Calumet, from the East Chicago Belt of May 16, 1896. Renamed June 29, 1907. Still operating, headquarters Hammond. Steam roster is the companion, 182 loc…

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48. NYC's "P Motor" Electric Locomotives

    Oct 24, 26 11:43 PM

    
    New York Central P motors: 22 Alco-GE 2-C+C-2 electrics, Cleveland Union Terminal 1050–1071, class P-1a. 3,030 hp one-hour on 3,000-volt DC catenary, then 660-volt third rail as P-2a and P-2b.

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49. Illinois Terminal Car Roster

    Oct 24, 26 11:40 PM

    
    Illinois Terminal cars. Mainline motors, the 1948 streamliners, sleepers, Alton and Valley Division cars, express motors, and the line cars rebuilt from pull cars.

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50. Illinois Terminal Diesel Roster

    Oct 24, 26 09:31 PM

    
    All-time Illinois Terminal diesels, 62 frames. Alco S-2s and RS-1s, EMD switchers, GP7s, SD39s, GP38-2s, and the two GP20s. Serial numbers from the 1989 roster.

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