Pittsburgh and Lake Erie Railroad

Ghost Corp Apparel — resurrecting iconic corporate ghosts.

Chartered in 1875, the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie Railroad—P&LE to the people who had schedules to keep—linked Pittsburgh with Youngstown, Ohio by 1879 and later reached Connellsville, Pennsylvania. Its Pittsburgh headquarters stood at the South Side terminal complex beside the Monongahela River, where a railroad could look important simply by having a train shed the size of a weather system.

The line earned its “Little Giant” nickname by hauling enormous volumes over a comparatively compact system. Coal, coke, limestone, iron ore and finished steel supplied the industrial valley between Pittsburgh and Youngstown. New York Central gained control in 1889 but continued to operate P&LE as a distinct railroad, complete with its own identity and reporting mark, PLE.

After Penn Central’s 1970 bankruptcy, P&LE avoided inclusion in Conrail and returned to independent operation. In 1976, trackage rights finally took its trains to Ashtabula Harbor on Lake Erie—an overdue meeting with the lake in its name. A new locally backed P&LE company acquired the railroad in 1979, just as the region’s steel business began its painful contraction.

Our Pittsburgh and Lake Erie Railroad collection celebrates the black-and-yellow Little Giant, Pittsburgh riverfront railroading, and a tough industrial carrier whose final P&LE train ran on September 11, 1992. CSX’s Three Rivers Railway began operating acquired P&LE lines the following day—proof that even corporate ghosts can leave a very long right-of-way behind.