carrier Indiana & Ohio Railway (IORY) began interchanging grain trains with NS in Clare Yard. The daily road trains had been eliminated or rerouted by 2000, but the bulk commodity traffic remained to still provide daily traffic on the line. While extensive repairs needed for the
large bridge over the Scioto River at Vera Junction in Portsmouth were cited as the reason for the line’s closure, the line also had many other operational challenges that would sometimes require doubling, and occasionally tripling, some of the hills on the line. With grades like the five-mile- long westbound climb up Irvington Hill, topping out at 1.4 percent, and eastbound climbs like the shorter but still torturous Peebles Hill, another 1.4 percent, the line could easily become an operational headache. Another long climb is Batavia Hill between Batavia and Afton, which sometimes requires doubling, with a six- mile eastbound grade at 1 percent. After through traffic was removed,
the line was railbanked east of Seaman. Local freight L51, which had previously worked out of Portsmouth to Clare and return, became T51. The train originated out of the former Conrail Sharon Yard in Sharonville, traveling over the Indiana & Ohio’s Oasis Subdivision between CP Mill in Evendale and CP Valley in Fairfax, where it would regain NS trackage into Clare Yard. A few years later, the line was reopened
as far as Peebles at MP CT73.5 to service a raw crosstie facility that supplied NS. This business would remain until the closure of the line to Williamsburg and the lease to CCET in 2014. Other than the Peebles tie plant, other industries that provided regular traffic
previously included the B-Way plant in Newtown, a Ford transmission plant in Batavia, a Georgia-Pacific facility in Afton, Kibler Lumber in Mount Orab, and the Winchester Ag Services grain facility in Winchester. By 2012 the only one of these industries still receiving traffic from NS was Winchester Ag, and then only sporadically. The closures of the Ford plant in Batavia and Georgia- Pacific in Afton hit the remaining local traffic on the line hard. T51 would only venture beyond the Bulkmatic Transfer facility that is switched regularly at Clare Yard about once a week, going to Peebles with tie cars one day and returning the next. The old classic N&W color position
light (CPL) signals that had guarded the line for decades had long since gone dark, many of them having their heads bagged with canvas covers. The former passing sidings were filled with stored freight cars from the economic downturn. Things were looking bleak for the Peavine.
Huhtamaki and the State of Ohio The loss of the Ford transmission plant
in Batavia not only hit the Peavine hard as far as traffic goes, but also hit the economy of this small southwest Ohio town big time as well. With the economic downturn, jobs were becoming few and far between. The state of Ohio started shopping the former Ford plant as an economic development project, touting its access to both rail and adjacent Route 32 as a prime development site for future business. The state was able to secure more than one tenant for the facility, dividing it into sections. The big winner, as far as both the railroad and the local economy was concerned, was Huhtamaki. The company already had a plastics facility located in the nearby town of New Vienna, served on a branchline of the Indiana & Ohio Railway. This new facility in Batavia would make paper cups and paper plates for contracts and would receive boxcar loads of paper, as
TOP RIGHT: CCET GP49 No. 2807 rolls westbound along Roundbottom Road in Milford on July 15, 2014.
RIGHT: The train crew has just loaded up their grips and climbed aboard CCET No. 2807 as the CCET01 Job gets ready to depart eastbound from the CCET’s Ancor Terminal in Newtown on September 28, 2015.
BELOW: Leased RJ Corman GP38 No. 3863 switches the Huhtamaki Spur on June 24, 2014. The train is about to cross Curliss Lane in Batavia.
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