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The Cleveland Trains
Conway took a more ambitious step in 1930. The C&LE operated a joint interline venture with the LSE that gave the C&LE’s freight department the opportunity to run trains to and from Cleveland. The two traction companies pooled freight equipment—each company providing a share of the motive power used for the interline service. The LSE and the C&LE commenced freight service between Dayton and Cleveland via Toledo during fall 1930. It was part of a strategy to capture merchandise that the C&LE’s competitor, the Lima Route lines, had carried for years between the two cities. Then in late 1930 the LSE and the C&LE began freight runs between Cincinnati and Cleveland. The Cincinnati-Cleveland freights covered 335 track miles; they represented the longest interurban freight run in history. Judging from the entries in the freight conductor’s car reports, the Cincinnati-Cleveland train left Cincinnati between 4:00 and 5:00 P.M., changed to an LSE crew at Toledo after midnight, and rolled into Cleveland before 8:00 A.M. The southbound trip—Cleveland to Cincinnati—ran a similar schedule. The C&LE assigned its very fast wooden-sheathed freight motors to the Cleveland runs, and the LSE put on its equally powerful steel and wooden motor cars. For example, the C&LE dispatched the Cincinnati-Cleveland run on the evening of 11 December 1930, with LSE number 40 providing the motive power for the train. On 6 and 13 January 1931 it scheduled LSE 39 and LSE 37, respectively, for Cleveland. The trains departed from Cincinnati’s Cumminsville freight house with one or more trailers in tow. LSE numbers 37, 39, and 40 each carried four 140-horsepower motors.19 Figure 32 shows C&LE 776 parked at LSE’s Eagle Avenue freight house in downtown Cleveland. Number 776 was equipped with WH 125-horsepower motors and frequently handled the daily runs to and from Cleveland.

The C&LE’s business with the LSE was good, but might be better. Conway chafed at the fact that shippers still continued to move large quantities of freight between Cleveland and Dayton using a competitive interurban route, one that paralleled the C&LE’s Springfield-Toledo division. The competitor was the Lima Route line, and its principle partners were the Dayton & Troy Electric and the Western Ohio Railway. Connecting with the LSE at Fremont, the Lima Route operated nightly joint freight service with the LSE north and south, carrying business that Conway dearly wanted (see map at Fig. 1). The Lima Route’s joint venture transported an average of four million pounds a month between Cleveland and Dayton.20 Conway and F. W. Coen, president of the LSE, wanted to reroute all of that freight through Toledo, and Coen wanted to break his long-standing alliance with the Lima Route companies. The two men canceled tariffs with the Western Ohio, hoping to put the Lima Route companies out of business. The Ohio Public Utilities Commission, however, made the companies reinstate the tariffs. Shippers began to switch to the C&LE-LSE partnership, however, suspecting that the Lima Route companies were too weak to survive. They were right. On 16 January 1932 the Western Ohio, the linchpin of the organization, collapsed.

Meanwhile the Dayton & Western (D&W), the forty-mile line that operated between Dayton and Richmond, suffered a major decline in freight bookings and passenger revenues in 1931. Conway knew that if the D&W foundered, the C&LE would lose its Richmond connection with the Indiana Railroad (IRR), and, consequently, Indianapolis. He arranged to take over the management of the D&W, giving his executives control over the line’s freight-train movements. Close supervision ensured that the D&W delivered loaded trailers to Richmond in time to make the departure of the Indiana Railroad’s nightly westbound Indianapolis train.

The C&LE’s revenue and earnings also nose-dived in 1931, forcing Conway to reduce wages and convert two-man passenger cars to one-man cars. The C&LE failed to make the interest payments on its bonded debt and lapsed into receivership—a sort of Chapter 11 bankruptcy for railroads—on 28 January 1932. Conway, however, saw the country’s business problems as a temporary phenomenon. Based on his understanding of economic history, he concluded that the present business downturn would be short-lived. He knew that the country’s worst recession, the panic of 1893, lasted four years, and judging by past history, Conway reasoned that the slump that began in 1929 soon would run out of steam. This depression, however, did not play by the old rules. Banks failed, manufacturing continued its downward spiral, and the nation’s unemployment rate hit new highs.

The depression wiped out most of the Michigan interurban network with the exception of the Toledo-Detroit line. And there was more bad news for Conway’s interurban. In 1931 the New York Central system’s freight forwarding company, Universal Carloading and Distributing, terminated its shipping arrangements with the C&LE. Conway stated in 1933 that Universal “has been a large shipper over our lines. That business has been lost to our rails and it was [now] moving by other means.”21 Then on 30 June 1932 the Fort Wayne-Lima terminated rail service and broke off C&LE’s connection to northern Indiana. This was a sad loss because the C&LE exchanged eight to ten cars a day at Lima with the Fort Wayne road.22 It was also a blow to the IRR’s freight business—severing its direct route to the Cleveland and Detroit markets. Also on 30 June a C&LE train was involved in a brutal head-on collision north of Trenton on the Cincinnati division. Just before 7:00 A.M. the southbound Cleveland-Cincinnati freight, powered by LSE 34, collided with a northbound C&LE passenger car on the curve at Elk Creek, killing nine people. The passenger-car motorman ignored the dispatcher’s order to meet and pass the Cincinnati-bound freight at the Trenton siding23 (see Fig. 33). The C&LE did not employ block signals on its single-track interurban system, operating under timetable and train-order rights only. Block signals—had they been installed on blind curves at least—might have prevented the accident. The train orders issued on the morning of the wreck clearly indicate Conway’s priorities. The dispatcher directed the passenger car to take siding for a loaded Cleveland-Cincinnati freight train due at Cumminsville at 8:00 A.M., giving the freight train a clear track. A loaded freight made money. A half-empty passenger car did not.

Hard Times
The depression delivered yet another blow to the C&LE’s fight for survival. The Eastern-Michigan Toledo Railroad, paralyzed with debt, finally abandoned its fifty-six-mile right-of-way between Toledo and Detroit on 4 October 1932, forcing the C&LE to give up its Cincinnati-Detroit passenger service. The real tragedy, though, was the loss of its daily freight runs between Cincinnati and Detroit. With the Detroit connection gone, the C&LE prayed that its two remaining partners—the IRR and the LSE—could ride out the storm. The year 1932 had been a grim one for Conway. This depression was unlike anything experienced in America before or since, and by March 1933, 25 percent of the nation’s workforce was unemployed. In the highly industrialized regions of Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana, the rate stood at 50 percent or higher.24 Without unemployment insurance, public assistance programs, and works projects, which would come later, families doubled up and shared, and the long soup lines of the 1930s became the signature of the times. Franklin D. Roosevelt called for a bank holiday, shutting down all the banks for a four-day period, stemming the growing panic among depositors.

The competition among freight carriers was savage, with small truck companies springing like weeds from cracks in the asphalt. These unregulated contract haulers made deals with shippers that undercut the tariff rates of the steam railroads, interurbans, and the regulated truckers. Conway summed up the problem during a special master’s hearing in 1933: “The truck rates fluctuate from day to day and week to week, depending upon the amount and virulence of the truck competition.”25 He characterized the cut-rate truckers as “phenomena of the depression.”26 One of Conway’s singular strengths, though, was his ability to change strategies rapidly. He correctly perceived that the C&LE had to match the truckers’ ability to move goods door-to-door and that its interurban freight trains had to equal or beat the truckers’ speed on the road. C&LE’s forwarding company, Stordor, began to pick up and deliver all customer shipments, at no charge to its shippers. In order to increase freight-train speed, Conway’s schedulers cut many of its trains in half, adding second sections where necessary.

In 1932 Conway and the LSE management tried to decrease the running time on the fourteen-to-fifteen-hour freight haul between Cincinnati and Cleveland. Conway wanted to cover the 335 miles in twelve to thirteen hours by holding train departures until 6:00 P.M. or later. With the tighter schedule, Stordor picked up freight on the shipper’s dock up to 5:00 P.M. on the day before and then delivered it by truck to the consignee’s loading dock between 8:00 and 8:30 A.M. the next morning. The C&LE made first-morning delivery a way of life—a daily habit—practiced by its trainmen, freight handlers, and dispatchers throughout the system. The C&LE managed to stem its revenue decline by the end of 1933 and over the next three years showed a small increase in the company’s gross receipts. First-morning delivery was the glue that held the company together, and the C&LE generated enough revenue to pay its operating costs, state and local income taxes, and at least some portion of the mortgage on the high speeds. The bondholders and general creditors, however, remained unpaid.

In early 1936 the C&LE added a northbound and a southbound train between Cincinnati and Cleveland. At the same time the freight department discontinued the runs between Dayton and Cleveland. This scheduling change reflected the importance of accommodating southern shippers who moved goods through Cincinnati billed to Lima, Toledo, and Cleveland and demanded first-morning delivery.27 Figure 34 shows C&LE 632, circa 1936, pulling a four-car train through Beach Park, Ohio, on the Cleveland run.

On 30 June 1936 the C&LE officially gave up the supervision of the Dayton & Western (D&W). Then the IRR agreed to lease D&W’s track and power lines and substitute its own rolling stock. As a result, the big orange passenger cars of the IRR cued up behind the C&LE’s high speeds at the Dayton interurban terminal, and the IRR’s freight motors made the daily 109-mile grind between Indianapolis and Dayton. Figures 35 and 36 show two of the IRR’s main-line freight motors laying over at the Dayton station.

More Bad News
The year 1937, however, brought another slump in the economy—dubbed a recession within the depression by the Roosevelt administration—spelling a disaster for the C&LE. On 8 May the IRR, suffering a decline in revenue and labor problems in Anderson, shut down its Dayton-Indianapolis division, breaking off the last interurban connection between Ohio and Indiana. Seven days later, on 15 May 1937, an estimated one hundred LSE freight handlers and clerks walked off the job, demanding higher wages. Coen, the company’s receiver, without hesitation shut down the LSE’s freight operations.28 There had been no advance warning, and Coen’s decision had C&LE’s management scrambling to find another carrier to handle the freight between Toledo and Cleveland. It was a last-ditch effort to save the Cleveland business and to save the interurban railway.

Conway stated that prior to 15 May 1937 the C&LE “interchanged . . . 10 million pounds of freight per month at Toledo.”29 And now it had to find a substitute carrier to replace the LSE or lose the battle for survival. The C&LE made a deal with Norwalk Trucking Company to handle all of its freight between Cleveland and its railhead at Toledo. This arrangement—to truck the freight between Cleveland and Toledo—created a major problem because the shipments “rarely, if ever, arrived until late on the next succeeding day.”30 The C&LE staked its reputation on early morning delivery. Late afternoon delivery would not cut it.

After struggling four long months to recover the Cleveland business, the C&LE gave up and petitioned the court for the right to abandon the 137-mile Springfield-Toledo division. The court noted that the lost connections with Cleveland and Indianapolis had produced an immediate decline in revenue of $30,000 a month.31 That’s $360,000 annualized. It also represented about 30 percent of the railroad’s annual revenues. The C&LE shut down the Springfield-Toledo division in November 1937. The Columbus division disappeared one year later, and the C&LE made its last interurban run between Hamilton and Dayton in May 1939.

Final Observations
Despite the initial surge in ridership that came with the introduction of the Red Devils, passenger revenues went into a decline in 1931 and never recovered. Freight, too, declined, but to a lesser extent. For all of its difficulties, the C&LE, during its short history, probably offered one of the best regional electric-railway freight services in the central-states area. Consider what it managed to do. The company’s freight department lined up a set of freight trains that ran 126 miles nightly between Cincinnati and Columbus, 217 miles between Cincinnati and Toledo, 275 miles between Cincinnati and Detroit, and 335 miles between Cincinnati and Cleveland. In addition, Conway’s road exchanged freight cars with lines serving Fort Wayne, Indianapolis, and the greater Indiana market. C&LE’s overnight trains pulled into their destinations early the next morning, the last one in by 8:00 A.M. The company ran this service—day in and day out—with precision and regularity.
The author compared the FedEx® “First Over-night” service with the C&LE “First Morning” delivery. For example, if you want to send a piece of freight from zip code 45215 in Cincinnati to the center of Cleveland, FedEx® will pick up until 6:30 P.M. and deliver at 8:00 A.M. the next day. In the old days the C&LE would have picked up that same piece of freight by 5:00 P.M. and dropped it off at the customer’s door the following day between 8:00 and 8:30 A.M. It would appear that FedEx’s top-of-the-line service is just minimally better than C&LE’s routine first-morning delivery and a whole lot more expensive.

It is impressive that the C&LE, a bankrupt, depression-era trolley-freight business, just about matched the regional delivery speed of the present-day worldwide FedEx®. Unfortunately it was not enough. C&LE failed to survive the depression because one by one its most important freight connections simply evaporated. It is interesting, though, to look at this line’s freight operations in light of the reemergence of the short-line and regional freight railroad in America today. The C&LE and today’s successful carriers have many things in common: the willingness to innovate and the ability to react quickly to competition, to solve customer problems, and to forge strong interchange agreements.

Tom Hoback, president of today’s IRR, a premier, regional freight carrier, sums it up in his shipper’s guide: “In the end it comes down to this: Indiana Rail Road delivers freight on time. No exceptions. No excuses.” The old gang at the C&LE would surely drink to that.