The Cincinnati Southern Railroad
The Cincinnati Southern Railroad was Scott County’s first railroad, constructed by the city of Cincinnati, Oh. in the 1870s and early 1880s to link itself with Chattanooga and the South for reasons of commerce. The railroad opened Scott County to major timber-cutting and coal-mining operations and gave rise to several other railroads that were based here, including the short-lived Knoxville & New River Railroad, the Tennessee Railroad, the Brimstone Railroad and the O&W Railroad. Separate crews worked their way southward from Cincinnati and northward from Chattanooga as the railroad was built, and they met in Robbins. Today, the Cincinnati Southern is known as the Norfolk-Southern Railroad.
Precursor to a railroad
In 1863, Union Gen. Ambrose Burnside marched his 12,000-man-strong army through Scott County as he traveled to Knoxville to seize East Tennessee from the control of the Confederacy. He had requested permission from President Abraham Lincoln to build a military railroad from the Kentucky River to Knoxville, but that plan was never realized.
Once the war ended, the city of Cincinnati began exploring a railroad to link itself to the South. Its merchants were forced to barge their goods 150 miles downstream to a railhead at Louisville, where they were charged high prices to ship the cargo on the rail.
A feud with the city of Louisville ultimately led Cincinnati to build its own railroad, which it began planning in 1869. It commissioned surveyors to determine a route from Cincinnati to either Knoxville or Chattanooga. Ultimately, the city hired William Gunn, who had been Gen. Burnside’s chief surveyor during the war, to help determine the route.
Choosing Scott County
Gunn and his team came up with 26 potential routes for a railroad between southern Ohio and East Tennessee. That number was reduced to three finalists. Among them:
1.) The Cincinnati Southern would travel from Kings Mountain to Crossville via Jamestown, then down the Cumberland Plateau to Chattanooga.
2.) The Cincinnati Southern would travel just west of the Cumberland Plateau peaks, traveling down the mountain at Harriman and Rockwood and continuing to Chattanooga.
3.) The Cincinnati Southern would again follow the route just west of the peaks, then follow New River and cross the mountains to Knoxville before traveling on to Chattanooga.
Ultimately, Cincinnati chose option No. 2, which would bring the railroad into Scott County at Isham, located along the Tennessee-Kentucky border, and exit the county south of Glenmary at the Scott-Morgan county line. The third option would have also brought the railroad to Scott County, but from present-day Oneida it would have followed Paint Rock Creek to New River and then followed New River — much like the Tennessee Railroad that would come later.
Construction
Construction of the railroad began in Chattanooga in 1879. From Chattanooga to Harriman, the railroad followed the western ridge of the Tennessee River Valley. North of Harriman, the grade became steeper and numerous tunnels were constructed. Meanwhile, a second construction crew began working southward from Kings Mountain. The plan was for the two crews to meet at a construction camp in New River, just north of a bridge over the river.
The railroad was constructed through Scott County using five-foot gauge. That size was the standard in the South at the time.
By late 1879, the railroad construction crews entered Scott County at Isham and completed a small trestle over Bear Creek.
Prior to the building of the railroad, there were only two named communities that the railroad would pass through in Scott County: Isham and Rugby Road, which is now known as Elgin. The rest of the modern places along the railroad were named by railroad engineers and executives, as was common practice at the time. The railroad was designed to operate on a time table, which were planned so that trains would remain several miles apart to prevent collision. At each place where trains would meet, side rails would be built. Each side rail was given a placename. Refueling locations and watering stations along the railroad also had placenames assigned to them.
According to historian Michael O’Neal, one of those sidings was located in a meadow that Cincinnati Southern lawyer Charles D. McGuffy named “Oneida,” after his hometown of Oneida, Oh. Two miles further down the track was a siding that was named High Point, because it was the highest elevation point along the entire route from Cincinnati to Chattanooga. According to O’Neal, it would’ve customarily been named “Summit,” but was named “High Point” to avoid confusion with Somerset, Ky. Coal branch lines were built at Helenwood, and it is not known how it got its name. South of New River, the Robbins siding was named for A.J.C. Robbins, the foreman of the construction gang that built Tunnel #15 nearby. Rugby Road was renamed Elgin to prevent confusion with Rockwood further down the line.
There were three tunnels in Scott County, numbered Tunnel #13, Tunnel #14, and Tunnel #15. Tunnels were numbered from north to south, starting with Tunnel #1 closest to Cincinnati. Tunnels #13 and #14 were located between Helenwood and New River. Tunnel #15 was located near Robbins. At 2,580 feet, it was by far the longest of the three.
Robbins surveyed the tunnel’s entrances at the north and south ends. A hollow fill was used to build the grade on the north end, while a route was cut through the slope on the south end.
According to O’Neal: “The construction gangs consisted of paid and conscript labor, under the employee of engineering contractors to the railroad. The contractors for the southern part of the CS were located in Birmingham. Since the Civil War the city used its natural resource of iron ore and its strategic location as a major railroad hub to attract civil engineers and to build railroads. The Robbins Engineering Company of Birmingham was used to construct grades and tunnels in Scott County. The last tunnel, Tunnel 15, was to be built by A. J. C. Robbins, for whom the town of Robbins would be named, had several engineering and non-engineering problems in the construction of this tunnel. It was a long tunnel, 2580 feet long cut into limestone. To his advantage, this meant that the tunnel did not require “lining,” a coating of bricks, fitted rocks or concrete to hold back loose soil and rock, but it was full of underground seepages where water would leak through. His non-engineering problem was the construction gang. ROBBINS was bringing white and black construction gangs up from Birmingham and elsewhere in the South into what was developing into a paradise for hunters, fishermen and slackers. In previous tunnel work along this route ROBBINS found that people would sign the timecard, get their tools and enter the tunnel opening, but then they would take advantage of the busy coming and going of men during work and slip out into the woods. After a day of fishing or hunting, or just enjoying the day, these men would slip back into the tunnel and then march out with the rest at the end of the day, signing the timecard along the way. Robbins solved this problem at Tunnel 15.
“Robbins carefully surveyed the tunnel entrances at the north and south ends. At the north end he had to fill the hollow and make a grade along the opposite side of what is now known as Railroad Hollow, in order to meet up with the bridge crew at New River. At the south end he had to cut the slope about a quarter of a mile before the overburden became limestone high enough to bear tunneling through. Rock and dirt dug from the southern part of the tunnel was transported on wagons and used as fill on the north grade across the hollow. On top of the hill ROBBINS start his third construction site and solved his missing personnel problem. He dug a large hole straight down the mountain, on top of the route that the tunnel would take. The hole was stopped at the level that the tracks would be in the tunnel, and then dug the tunnel from the north and south ends of the hole, toward the tunnel entrances. Workmen, tools, equipment, rocks and dirt were hauled out of the hole using steam powered elevators. Small tram tracks were built in the tunnel, like in a deep mine, for removing the rock and dirt. The trams were raised by the steam powered elevators and then were pushed to a transfer point onto wagons pulled down the hill. This rock and dirt was also used to make the fill and grade for the northern approach. When the workday started the men and tools went down the elevator. Nothing came out during the day except for the little ore cars. A crew remained on top to operate the elevator and to push the ore cars to the transfer point and back. Lunch was taken in the tunnel and the men were let out at the end of the work day. This was how Robbins got conscript labor to work in paradise.”
The work is finished
Just north of Tunnel #15, a bridge was constructed over New River. The bridge was built by T.F. Pyott of Chattanooga. It was a modification of a Fink bridge truss. It was 930 ft. long, with 730 ft. of iron trestle and a 200 ft. central span over the river, supported by four masonry piers.
The two track gangs met inside Tunnel #15, three feet south of mile post #216.
The first train ran on Dec. 19, 1879, and passenger service began in February 1880. Baldwin Locomotive Works steam engines were used to pull both passenger and freight trains.
The railroad was operated in three divisions, with crews assigned to each division. A fresh team took over at the end of each division. The division points were located at Danville, Ky. and Rockwood. The second division became famous because of the 27 tunnels that were required over the 100-mile route between Danville and Rockwood. These tunnels were on hills and curves, making the route more treacherous. As a result, the second division earned its famous nickname: The Rathole Division.
Through the years
Within one year of operation, the city of Cincinnati realized the railroad would be too expensive to operate, and bids were requested to lease and operate the line. The Erlanger Company — named for German railroad operator Emile Erlanger — won the bid. Erlanger already had railroads connecting Birmingham to New Orleans, New Orleans to the Northeast, and Atlanta to Chattanooga. It renamed the Cincinnati Southern the Cincinnati, New Orleans & Texas Pacific Railroad Company, or CNO&TP. It signed a 99-year lease, with rent of $800,000 per year for the first five years and $1.25 million per year thereafter, along with a cut of the profits.
The deal between Erlanger and Cincinnati included a clause that any branch line had to be approved by the city before it could be built. Through the years, 14 independently-owned branch lines were built, with nearly half of them operating in Scott County: The Knoxville & New River, the Tennessee (originally the Paint Rock Coal & Coke Co. Railroad), the Oneida & Western, the Brimstone, and the Kentucky & Tennessee. There were two smaller branch lines at Helenwood and Glenmary.
In the 1890s, a consolidation occurred under the Southern Railway System. Southern negotiated with the city of Cincinnati to control the CNO&TP and honor the lease agreement, which meant the CNO&TP operated as an independent organization, with majority ownership by the Southern Railway System.
The original bridge at New River was replaced in 1906, with new concrete piers and the iron Fink truss being traded for a steel modified Pratt truss. The railroad converted from a single track to a double track, though bridges and tunnels remained as single tracks.
The stock market crash of 1928 severely hampered the Southern Railroad until the 1960s. As a result, the railroad stopped buying steam locomotives and maintained its existing fleet until it began replacing the steam engines with diesel locomotives in the 1940s and 1950s.
The first diesel locomotive was entered into service on the CNO&TP in 1941. It was green and white with a gold stripe and gold lettering. It was locomotive #1600. The railroad eventually replaced its entire locomotive roster with the diesel engines. The last steam locomotive ran on the railroad on June 17, 1953, and the Southern Railway became the first railroad in the country to be fully dieselized.
The Southern also became the first railroad to use the Centralized Traffic Control System, using the CNO&TP as its test track. Electric light signals were installed on signal bridges, and were controlled from a board in Somerset, Ky. The signal towers that had existed earlier were removed by the start of the 1960s.
Through the 1960s and into the 1970s, computerized equipment replaced paperwork, and cars were tracked in real time. Passenger train service was phased out.
Also in the 1960s, the railroad began to phase out tunnels. In 1963, the new bridge over New River was opened, allowing the CNO&TP to bypass Tunnels #13, #14 and #15 between Helenwood and Robbins. (Tunnels #13 and #14 had already been bypassed. The Southern Railway also purchased the Tennessee Railroad a few years later and immediately daylighted the tunnel at Tunnel Hill between Oneida and Paint Rock; it was the last train tunnel in Scott County.)
With the completion of the 330-ft.-tall New River Bridge in 1963, it became one of the tallest railroad bridges in North America, and the railroad had a new route between Helenwood and Robbins by going through the Mountain View community. The train tracks from Helenwood to New River remained in place for the Brimstone Railroad, but the tracks over the old bridge at New River and through Tunnel #15 at Robbins were removed.
In the 1980s, the Southern Railway merged with the Norfolk and Western Railroad, forming the Norfolk-Southern.