Cincinnati District

Connecting the cities of Cincinnati and Williamsburg, the Cincinnati, Batavia & Williamsburg Railway (CB&W) was chartered on January 11, 1876. The name was changed to the Cincinnati & Eastern Railroad (C&E) and the eastern terminus was changed to Portsmouth by May. The main reason behind building the C&E is that it was projected to become a primary coal-hauling route from the Jackson County coalfields. Construction began almost immediately on the C&E and by October 18, 1876, the route was open for between Batavia Junction and Batavia. By August 4, 1877, the line had reached Winchester, a distance of . The C&E opened of a branch towards New Richmond from the Cincinnati, Georgetown & Portsmouth Railway at Richmond Junction to Tobasco on March 1, 1878. A western extension of the C&E to the Miami Valley Railroad (MV) was completed in June. The MV had proposed a narrow-gauge connection to Cincinnati via a tunnel through the Deer Creek valley, but after the Deer Creek tunnel project ran into financial difficulties, the C&E found that its connection to Cincinnati was useless thereby forcing the carrier to enter into bankruptcy on January 27, 1879. The high expense of the bridge and building an alignment through the Scioto Brush Creek valley caused the C&E to enter bankruptcy again on September 14. The C&E began preparation to convert its route from narrow-gauge to standard-gauge shortly after the completion of its railroad to Portsmouth. The O&NW then shifted its western terminus from the Cincinnati Northern depot to the Little Miami Railroad depot. Like its predecessors, the O&NW became insolvent and went into receivership on June 15, 1888. ==Subsequent history to current day==

The Scioto River crossing at Vera Junction was replaced with new multi-span truss bridges fabricated by the American Bridge Company in 1913. The mainline between was realigned in 1947 when a quarry opened along Plum Run required the line to be rerouted, which included the erection of a new trestle above Cedar Fork and the laying of several miles (km) of new track. The quarry became the primary source of ballast for the N&W and added a significant amount of traffic to the Portsmouth Branch until the mid-1980s. By the early 2000s, the bridge at Vera Junction had deteriorated and required expensive repairs, so, Norfolk Southern railbanked the Peavine between Peebles and Vera Junction in 2003. On March 21, 2014, the CCET, a subsidiary of Frontier Rail operating under the trade name Cincinnati East Terminal Railway (CCET) filed with the Surface Transportation Board (STB) to lease and operate the Portsmouth Branch between Clare (Mariemont) and Williamsburg. CCET took over operations on April 27. In late 2016, the CCET renamed itself the Cincinnati Eastern Railroad and filed with the STB to lease and operate more of the Portsmouth Branch between Williamsburg and Plum Run east of Peebles for the storage of cars. The railroad filed with the STB to extend the lease with the goal of restarting railroad operations at the Plum Run quarry in 2019. Regional Rail, LLC acquired the Cincinnati Eastern Railroad in 2024. == Further reading ==