New York, Chicago and St. Louis Railroad Co. (Nickel Plate Railroad, Buffalo, NY) Files

The New York, Chicago, and St. Louis Railway Company, more commonly known as the Nickel Plate Road [NKP], was founded in 1881. It ran along the southern shore of the Great Lakes, connecting Buffalo to Chicago, running through Cleveland and Fort Wayne. The Nickel Plate Road was a successful railroad, operating over 1600 miles of track in the Midwestern region of the United States at its peak.



In 1916, the Van Sweringen brothers purchased the Nickel Plate; they then expanded their railroad through the acquisitions of the Lake Erie and Western Railroad and the Toledo, St. Louis and Western Railroad, which was known as the Cloverleaf. These purchases expanded the reach of the Nickel Plate to Peoria, Illinois and to St. Louis and Toledo, respectively. The three lines were consolidated into one company in 1923. An additional consolidation with the Pere Marquette Railway and the Chesapeake and Ohio railroad was proposed in 1924, but was ultimately rejected by the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1926. In 1949, the Nickel Plate Road signed a ninety-nine year lease for the Wheeling and Lake Erie Railroad, granting it access to the mid-Atlantic states and the coal fields located there.



The Nickel Plate remained a solvent business through the 1950s, but in 1964 due to the increasing financial pressures on the railroad industry, it merged with six other railroads into the Norfolk and Western Railroad.