After Train Festival 2009 I was rummaging around the Buckeye State and was intrigued by the fate of the Toledo & Ohio Central. In the ConRail breakup the line south of Columbus went to NS and the rest to CSX. The northern part is paralleled to the west by the CSX's former B&O and to the east by CSX's former Hocking Valley. If only for the sake of the illusion of competition why didn't all of the former T&OC go to NS? It would also seem an ideal relief for NS' Sandusky line. This is purely railfan speculation, there are no wrong answers and all thoughts are welcome.
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T&OC Split Speculation
- Discussion related to the operations and equipment of Consolidated Rail Corp. (Conrail) from 1976 to its present operations as Conrail Shared Assets. Official web site can be found here: CONRAIL.COM.
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Here's some additional speculation to go along with. I'm guessing that the entire Columbus-Toledo route was treated as one line segment. CSX wasn't about to give up access to Honda (via the Scottslawn Secondary) and took the "rest" of the line from Ridgeway north as kind of a "throw in". Early on, NS did run some traffic via the T&OC when they were having their issues digesting their portion of Conrail. Another factor to consider is that with CSX getting both the line from Gallion to Columbus and Columbus to Ridgeway, the Conrail method of accessing Columbus for east-west traffic was maintained. The Toledo Branch from Ridgeway north to Toledo by itself wouldn't really do the NS a lot of good in serving as an alternate route.