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Table 3 (Fig. 11) shows the pounds shipped in the opposite direction, that is, from Cleveland over the LSE and connecting interurbans to Cincinnati and other CH&D towns.6 These numbers suggest that Cleveland’s merchants and manufacturers were shipping large quantities of freight to Cincinnati over Conway’s new railway. This “back haul” was essential to a profitable freight operation.

It is evident that Conway succeeded in doing what he set out to do. He expanded the CH&D’s freight business—while stemming the decline in passenger traffic between Cincinnati and Dayton. But as early as 1928 Conway began to fear that his two most important connecting carriers—the Indiana Columbus & Eastern (IC&E) and the Lima-Toledo Railroad (LT)—were on the verge of collapse. The IC&E operated between Dayton, Springfield, and Columbus, Ohio, and between Springfield and Lima, Ohio. The LT operated the direct route between Lima and Toledo. These two roads gave Conway the wherewithal to reach the important business centers in Michigan, northern Ohio, and Indiana (see map of CERA network Fig. 1). If either shut down, Conway would lose his vital freight connections to the important regional markets and the CH&D would die on the vine. Passenger traffic alone could not support the railway. Conway came up with a plan that he believed would save all three companies. He merged the three roads and provided capital for new equipment and the rehabilitation of track and roadbed.

Conway, however, intended to do more than just save the LT and the IC&E as connections. He wanted to initiate direct freight-train service from Dayton and Cincinnati to market centers such as Toledo, Columbus, Detroit, Cleveland, Fort Wayne, and Indianapolis, and he wanted his freight motors to work the point of these interline freight runs. He needed to acquire the IC&E and the LT to make this ambitious scheme work. Conway believed that this plan—to run daily freight trains hundreds of miles between major market centers in the Indiana-Ohio-Michigan region—was the salvation of the central-states interurbans. By 1929 Conway began to operate the IC&E, the LT, and the CH&D as though they were one company, while his lawyers worked out the merger details. LT freight motors were put on the IC&E’s regular merchandise runs between Dayton and Columbus. The IC&E and the LT passenger cars operated through trips between Toledo and Springfield, and cars from both companies made routine visits to the CH&D’s Moraine City shops. Figure 12 shows LT freight 752 and passenger car 61 laying over in the Moraine yards. Conway finally carried out the formal merger—creating the Cincinnati & Lake Erie Railroad (C&LE)—on 1 January 1930 (see route map of the C&LE—Fig. 13).

The Cincinnati & Lake Erie Railroad
The two new roads that C&LE acquired were endowed with excellent physical plants. Springfield, where the new 137-mile Springfield-Toledo division met the 71-mile Dayton-Columbus division, was C&LE’s junction city. The former IC&E terminal building and platforms in Springfield constituted one of the C&LE’s best passenger stations (Fig. 14). The Springfield-Columbus right-of-way paralleled U.S. 40, the famous National Road. Figure 15 displays track work through the village of Harmony. The C&LE ran its new high-speed limited parlor cars nonstop through here at speeds of seventy miles per hour. Conway lined, surfaced, and ballasted miles of the Columbus main line needing repair and maintenance. At an occasional small town between Springfield and Columbus the main line made a long curve around the village center. These bypasses were installed during 1902 in order to avoid the paving assessments that towns on the right-of-way threatened to levy against the interurban. The C&LE inherited a first-rate multitrack, off-street passenger and freight station at Columbus, constructed in 1912 by the Ohio Electric. Figure 16 shows high-speed car 129 on a layover in the Columbus terminal in 1934. The freight house is in the background.

The long Springfield-Toledo division boasted mile after mile of razor-straight, level track. Surveyed and constructed between 1906 and 1908 by the Ohio Electric, the stretch of right-of-way from Toledo to Lima and from Lima south to Bellefontaine was a racetrack on which passenger cars whipped along at ninety miles an hour, and loaded freight trains pushed fifty to sixty miles an hour. In 1929 Conway began to ballast, surface, and line every mile of open track between Springfield and Toledo. The results are evident in Figure 17, illustrating the roadway between Bellefontaine and Russels Point in February 1930. The C&LE gained an excellent three-track passenger station and a first-rate carbarn and shop, the equal of Moraine, in Lima with the LT merger. The poor location and inadequate size of the LT’s old Lima freight house, however, caused serious problems for the C&LE’s train crews. These circumstances changed in January 1932 when the Western Ohio Railway (WO) abandoned interurban operations and the C&LE acquired the WO’s favorably located, five-track Lima freight house (see Fig. 18).

The only restraints imposed on fast schedules between Lima and Toledo were street running in small towns on the main line and an occasional steam railroad grade crossing. Figure 19 shows high-speed car 123 traversing the rails of the Northern Ohio Railroad at Columbus Grove. (Note the angle of the passenger car’s trolley pole and the height of overhead wire above the grade crossing, which was dictated by state law.) By and large, however, the C&LE’s Toledo division enjoyed long stretches of tangent track, laid with seventy-pound rail, designed to support very fast freight and passenger service. The main line shown in Figure 20 located south of Maumee—newly ballasted and ditched—typifies the condition of the roadway between Toledo and Lima in 1930.
The Toledo entry route was the real prize of the LT acquisition. Rather than thread its way through a maze of local streets to reach the downtown area, the C&LE followed a high-speed route, constructed on private right-of-way, into the center of Toledo. The C&LE connected with the city’s streetcar tracks less than a mile from the interurban passenger station. This same link gave Conway’s freight trains a connection with the interurbans serving the Detroit and Cleveland areas. Figure 21 illustrates the entry route near the city’s center. (The boxcar on the siding was loaded at the C&LE’s Toledo freight house and spotted for a southbound evening freight train.)

The Year of the Consolidation
The year 1930 was a somewhat chaotic year for the newly created C&LE. The three separate companies, operating as one, experienced the usual problems that attended a merger. Business activity in the central-states area began to slow as inventories swelled and demand for capital equipment declined. Manufacturers began to lay off employees, and the Great Depression rolled across the nation’s economic landscape. Conway, noting the falloff in business activity, hoped that the introduction of twenty new low-level, high-speed passenger cars would stem the decline in ridership that plagued the central-states interurbans. The Cincinnati Car Company (CCCo) delivered the last of the twenty-car order at the end of June 1930. Conway hoped to lure the public back to interurban travel with C&LE’s new traction cars, which matched the speed and comfort of the steam railroads’ crack passenger trains. But first he had to persuade commuters to “park and ride,” that is, drive to the station, leave their auto in a free parking lot provided by the C&LE, and ride the interurban to their destination.

Conway’s new cars—called Go Devils when they first appeared and Red Devils in later years—cruised at eighty miles an hour and were clocked running with tapped fields at 101 miles per hour on the company’s north end.7 In order to attract riders for these fast and comfortable cars, Conway put in free parking lots at almost all of the stations throughout the system. To publicize the cars’ introduction, he staged publicity events such as the one captured in Figure 22. (C&LE 128, making ninety-seven miles per hour, crosses the finish line the clear winner. The race, filmed by Pathe News, played in movie houses throughout Ohio.)

The design features of the C&LE’s high-speed passenger cars are worth examining for several reasons. One could begin by arguing that they employed the most advanced technology of their period. They were certainly the fastest of their kind in scheduled operation and, given their weight, speed, and size, offered superlative comfort and riding qualities. Over the years the C&LE’s high speeds acquired something of a mythical status, and they were endowed with sobriquets such as Go Devil and Red Devil that implied rapid acceleration and velocity and perhaps a touch of mischief. They were clearly something out of the ordinary. If not the archetype for the Indiana Railroad high speeds and the Philadelphia & Western bullet cars, then they were certainly important working models for the engineers who designed those equally famous interurbans. Last of all, the C&LE hoped that its twenty new streamliners would soften the financial impact of an economic depression that had begun to spread, like a black mist, across the nation.

The C&LE Lightweight, Low-level, High-speed Interurban Cars
The CCCo delivered twenty lightweight, low-level, steel and aluminum passenger interurban cars to the C&LE in 1930. The C&LE divided this order into a set of local cars numbered 110 to 119 and a set of deluxe parlor cars numbered 120 to 129. General Electric (GE) made motors and controls for the locals, and Westinghouse (WH) made the motors and controls for the deluxe cars. CCCo designed and fabricated the trucks for all twenty. The shop crews and trainmen referred to the cars as the 110 or the 120 type. Number 110 (see Fig. 23) was the prototype for the twenty-car series, with an overall length of 44' 9?, extreme width of 8'10?, and weight of 48,000 pounds.8 The C&LE designed the car for the high platform loading the company expected to find in the proposed Cincinnati subway. Unfortunately, the subway project died early in the depression, and the Moraine shops systematically eliminated the traps and replaced the railroad doors with folding-leaf traction doors during 1931 and 1932.