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Discussion relating to the PRR, up to 1968. Visit the PRR Technical & Historical Society for more information.
 #592007  by salminkarkku
 
The "Hays T. Watkins Research Library" in Baltimore has a large collection of photos taken of railroads for valuation purposes by the B&O in its territory. This was for the ICC.
The library has a draft catalogue of these, and one item has a label:
"Unknown location, Pennsylvania RR -Marietta & Lake RR -bridge".

The only other reference I can find to the "Marietta & Lake" is in Edson's list of common carriers, where it is listed as operating 1910-12. I've not otherwise heard of it, either in connection with the Pennsy or otherwise. Has anyone else come across this railroad, so as to suggest where this bridge might have been?
 #592067  by RussNelson
 
It would help to know where the lake, or Lake, PA, was to be found. Don't see one. There was an electric railroad from Marietta to Columbia, which made its way up Chickies Ridge.

But generally, Pennsylvania is a CRAZY place for old railroads. You can't kick a clod of dirt without hitting an old railbed, or so it seems to me.
 #592508  by choess
 
Does Edson give any further information as to where the Marietta & Lake operated? It's not in Taber's encyclopedia, and it's not a name I remember from John Denny's article on the Columbia-Marietta trolleys. The PRR had a branch to Marietta, Ohio; perhaps it's in that state? (I had a clever hypothesis involving the infilling of Kerbaugh Lake near Marietta, but that occurred after the 1936 flood -- too late.)
 #592512  by choess
 
Posted too soon. There's a Google Books ref connecting the Marietta & Lake with Marietta, Ohio (something to do with the Standard Oil antitrust case, and shipping oil from the "Macksburg field"), and it shows up in several Ohio PUC reports as 4.70 miles long. The 1914 report gives one of the directors as E.P. [Erik Peter] Strandberg, a Chicago contractor; I suspect it was an independent road, maybe to serve some particular industry I haven't pinned down.
 #592566  by salminkarkku
 
Thanks, that at least pins it down to Marietta OH area.

I haven't been able to find a map showing this one. I can understand how common carrier logging railroads in the Deep South can vanish off the radar so completely that nobody has heard of them, but an Ohio short line and (presumably) a Pennsy feeder? Its obscurity is interesting in itself.
 #592633  by choess
 
Hmmm. 1910 Ohio PUC report gives what's probably the same railroad (E.P. Strandberg at head of the directors, some other directors the same) as the "Marietta & Lake Erie". I have a suspicion that (being owned by a major contractor) this may be only a nominal common carrier. Maybe a plant facility? Unfortunately, I don't have data for industries along the PRR Marietta Branch until 1945, and I didn't see anything obviously connected to this railroad.
 #592639  by CarterB
 
A USGS map of Macksburg quad in 1905 shows a PCC&StL line up through Macksburg up from Marietta.

An 1898 map of Ohio shows that line as the "C&M"

Also from https://kb.osu.edu/dspace/bitstream/181 ... 03_121.pdf
"In the meantime the Cleveland and Marietta Railroad had been completed
through Duck Creek Valley, making Macksburg a more desirable location
for operations than it had been earlier."
"One of the first problems with which the Macksburg producer had to contend
was getting the oil to the market. The completion of a pipe line to the Cleveland
and Marietta Railroad
in the fall of 1883 gave temporary relief. A year later a
pipe line was laid to the Muskingum River near Lowell, and the oil loaded on
boats. Early in 1885 owing to cold weather the pipe lines were unable to carry
the oil from the wells so that many tanks ran over, but it was considered a small
loss because of the low price of oil (Marietta Times, February 5, 1885). In the
summer of 1885 the National Transit, a subsidiary of the Standard Oil Company,
laid a three-inch pipe line to Parkersburg, West Virginia. Shortly afterwards
the National Transit bought the local pipe lines, and the transportation of the
oil was from that time a comparatively easy problem.
As production increased at Macksburg, it became the Mecca of the oil
fraternity. Hundreds of people poured into the area, largely from the Pennsylvania
fields. The small country village of Macksburg grew into a city almost
overnight."

http://books.google.com/books?id=tEgKAA ... #PPA102,M1

notes that the Cleveland & Marietta RR was in receivership and talks were in progress with a "Western & Lake Erie RR"
 #592875  by choess
 
I'm pretty sure the Cleveland & Marietta was what became the PRR's Marietta Branch, after a period of ownership by the W&LE. Given that there is no "lake" in the Macksburg area, which appears to be more than 4.7 miles from Marietta, I wonder if the Standard Oil testimony is a false lead, and the speaker really meant the Cleveland & Marietta. That company had become the Cleveland & Mahoning in 1886 and part of the Toledo, Columbus & Ohio River in 1911 -- this shows up separately, as a PRR subsidiary, in the same reports that display the Marietta & Lake as an independent common carrier.
 #593386  by salminkarkku
 
The coxrail.com railroad scripophilia site has both "Marietta & Lake" and "Marietta & Lake Erie" on its list of "locations unknown" railroad companies which issued paper. Thus it would seem that these had issued share capital in their own right. The latter doesn't appear in Edson's common carrier list, so I presume it was a paper rr only, and guess that it was a predecessor of the M&E.