Customer Reviews

The Hocking Valley Railway

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The book is full of much good information and good reading. The only problem I had was that the maps are hard to read, with very fine print.
It is good reading and informative.

Edward Miller's "The Hocking Valley Railway" is an excellent overall study of an important and one-time significant coal hauler from the Hocking coal fields in southeast Ohio to Toledo. Connections via an Ohio River bridge brought additional overhead coal traffic from West Virginia mines.

Miller's book gives a straighforward history of the line and its predecessors, freight and passenger traffic, motive power, its merger into the C&O, and the eventual demise of portions of the line, as the mines and local industries played out. His writing style is easy to read and quite conversational. The book is an enjoyable read.

Published by Ohio University Press, the production value suffers from typical collegiate presses: the use of uncoated paper stock; muddy, fair-to-poor photograph reproduction; and almost unusable maps printed so finely and of such small size that labels and text are virtually indecipherable.

Tom Dixon, the noted C&O authority and Roger Grant, of Clemson University, contribute frontmatter to the book. Both men are well versed in railroad literature having each penned numerous well-received books on their own. Their presence lends authenticity to the content.

Despite the lower quality materials used by the publisher, Miller's work is an excellent study on this important and successful railroad and is recommended by this writer. No other significant work exists on the Hocking Valley.

The Hocking Valley Railway was one of those nice little railways that sprang up after the Civil War and before the big consoladations began in the early 1900's. The Hocking Valley was started with a definite plan. There was coal in the Hocking Valley and no way to get it to market. There was a market about a hundred miles away in Columbus. (This is all in Ohio.) The line got built and was profitable from day one.

Looking at a map of Ohio's railroads in 1865, almost all of them ran east to west. The only north-aouth route was in the extreme western part of the state from Cincinnati to Toledo. The Hocking Valley route ran from the southeastern part of the state to Toledo on Lake Erie at the western side of the state.

Eventually the Hocking Valley was to run 345 miles of track, all inside Ohio. By no means one of the big railroads, but a nice little one. Over the years stock in the Hocking Valley was purchased by other railroads so that by 1906 the Chesapeake and Ohio began to increase its interest in the road and in 1910 took over its operation.

This book is an excellent story of the financing, building and operation of a railroad.