Nickel Plate Road
defunct railway in the mid-central United States (1881–1964)
The New York, Chicago and St. Louis Railroad (reporting mark NKP), abbreviated NYC&St.L, was a railroad that operated in the mid-central United States from 1881 to 1964. Commonly referred to as the "Nickel Plate Road", the railroad served parts of the states of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri. Its primary connections occurred in Buffalo, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Indianapolis, St. Louis, and Toledo.
The Nickel Plate Road was constructed in 1881 along the South Shore of the Great Lakes to connect Buffalo and Chicago, in competition with the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway. At the end of 1960, NKP operated 2,170 miles (3,490 km) of road on 4,009 miles (6,452 km) of track, not including the 25 miles (40 km) of Lorain & West Virginia. That year it reported 9.758 billion net ton-miles of revenue freight and 41 million passenger-miles.
In 1964, the Nickel Plate Road and several other midwestern carriers were merged into the larger Norfolk and Western Railway (N&W). The goal of the N&W expansion was to form a more competitive and successful system serving 14 states and the Canadian province of Ontario on more than 7,000 miles (11,000 km) of railroad.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Nickel Plate Road” is defunct railway in the mid-central United States (1881–1964). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Nickel, Plate and Road, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3339032. VIAF identifies the subject as 142039429. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1881, 1964 and 1960.
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This entry incorporates text from “Nickel Plate Road” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.