GEOLOGIC MATERIALS AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF OHIO RAILROADS 1830-1930

Before the 1850s, water courses were considered the main transportation mode of people and materials in Ohio. Early railroads like the Erie & Kalamazoo and Mad River & Lake Erie were merely constructed to connect such water bodies. As railroads became favored, they were projected along river courses or canals to maintain the lowest grades possible. Stone for ballast came from Pleistocene outwash and alluvium discovered during the grading of the lines. The Pittsburgh Fort Wayne & Chicago, built across northern Ohio in the 1850s, excavated kame gravels at Leesville to supply ballast; around 1877 this exhausted deposit was replaced by a quarry opened in Silurian Greenfield dolomite at Dunkirk. The Erie Railroad had a pit in river gravels at a site that became the community of Hepburn around 1882. Quarried bedrock was also used by Ohio railroads in the construction of bridges and some depots. An early use of building stone came from shallow quarries in the Devonian Delaware limestone at Sandusky in the late 1840s-early 1850s; used in early bridges along the Mad River & Lake Erie line between Sandusky and Dayton. The opening of the Toledo Norwalk & Cleveland in 1852 provided more ready access to the Devonian Berea sandstone in the Berea and Amherst areas and this stone fast became a favored building stone by the Big Four and Lake Shore & Michigan Southern lines in northern and western Ohio. One of the earliest structures to be built of this stone was Cleveland's Union Depot. Other notable structures include many railroad bridges between Sandusky and Conneaut and passenger depots at Berea, Painesville, and Sandusky. A major B&O viaduct at Lodi is composed of Berea sandstone quarried at Plymouth. The Toledo & Ohio Central line used Berea sandstone from a quarry at Fulton for bridge abutments and piers. The Cleveland Akron & Canton line used similar stone from quarries at Sunbury. Mississippian limestones and sandstones from Piketon and White Cottage found use along the the N&W and T&OC. The large B&O viaduct at Bellaire contains Pennsylvanian sandstone from Martins Ferry and concrete containing Pennsylvanian limestone from Barnesville area quarries.