Pittsburgh and Lake Erie Railroad

The Pittsburgh and Lake Erie Railroad, known as the Little Giant, was a short but intensely busy freight and passenger railroad running between Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Youngstown, Ohio, with later extensions to Connellsville and, by 1914, Ashtabula on Lake Erie. It operated about a tenth of one percent of the nation's route mileage yet hauled around one percent of its tonnage, because it served the steel mills of the Pittsburgh area and earned most of its revenue from coal, coke, iron ore, limestone and steel. The New York Central system controlled it from the late 1880s, and it stayed a separate company even after the 1968 Penn Central merger. The decline of the steel industry ended its life as an independent line when CSX bought it in 1992.