The Lancaster & Chester Railway Company’s origins date back to 1873 when the Cheraw & Chester was chartered to build a line between its namesake cities. Twenty-nine miles of track were built from Chester to Lancaster before the company had financial problems and went bankrupt. In June 1896, 130 years ago, the railroad was foreclosed on and sold at auction to Leroy Springs, who named it the Lancaster & Chester. Leroy Springs’s existing textile business supplied a steady traffic base for the new railroad.
The L&C suffered multiple misfortunes in its early years. In the span of a few months in 1899, both the Catawba River Trestle and original Lancaster Depot burned. The cost to replace both structures nearly equaled what Springs paid for the railway three years earlier. However, the misfortune did allow the company an opportunity to upgrade by building a steel trestle over the river to replace the original wooden one.
The railway was narrow gauge for the first six years of its existence. However, in 1906 Springs borrowed $125,000 from the Southern Railway to convert the line to standard gauge.
The Elliott Springs Era
Leroy Springs died in April 1931, leaving his empire to his only child, Elliott White Springs. Elliott Springs had been born just weeks after his father purchased the L&C and had a genuine love for the railway. Under his leadership, the L&C began to prosper in the second half of that decade. In 1939, on the evening before the outbreak of World War II, he brought the L&C national attention when he purchased the Loretto, a rail car built for the former president of U.S. Steel, Charles M. Schwab. Springs carefully preserved the 40-year-old car’s Victorian design.
Springs rarely did anything in a small way and usually had fun doing it. It was his idea to appoint 29 vice presidents to the railway, one for each mile of track. They included playwright Charles MacArthur, golfer Bobby Jones, artist James Montgomery Flagg, writer Lucius Beebe, radio man Lowell Thomas, and his wartime friends Billy Bishop and Clayton Knight. Another of the honorary vice presidents was Ham Fisher, who seldom drew a freight train in his Joe Palooka comic strip without labeling it Lancaster & Chester.
In 1951, burlesque entertainer Gypsy Rose Lee was on hand in Lancaster to unveil the new Williamsburg-style depot. In addition, Springs gave the L&C its slogan, “The Springmaid Line.” He even outfitted a Rolls Royce as a hi-rail inspection vehicle. In the late 1950s L&C adopted a light blue, gray, and white paint scheme to replace the dark scheme of its earlier diesels. Also in the 1950s, the company organized the L&C Railway Distribution Park in Richburg, which today is home to multiple customers including Guardian Industries, Porter Warner, and Thyssenkrupp.
Elliott Springs died in 1959 and his son-in-law, H.W. Close, became president of Springs Industries and the L&C Railway. In 1961, the railroad built a steel shop and engine house in Lancaster to replace the original wood structure.
The Later Years
In 1990, Steve Gedney became president of the L&C. Under his leadership the railroad gained multiple new customers, including Circle S Ranch, which built a feed mill at milepost 17 at Bascomville in 1998. Circle S originally planned to build at another site but Gedney convinced the owners to locate on L&C by pointing out that they could choose between the rates of the short line’s Class I connections, CSX and Norfolk Southern, and have the best of both worlds. Circle S has proven to be a very busy customer for L&C, regularly receiving three or four unit grain trains a month.
In 1996, L&C started a passenger car restoration program operated by Bob Willets. This continued throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s. Passenger excursions operated by the railroad during these years included a few dinner trains, a yearly Fort Lawn Spring Festival train in April, and Santa Trains during the first weekend of December from 2006 until the railroad ended its passenger program in 2014.
In 2001, the L&C signed a lease-purchase agreement with Norfolk Southern to operate 32 additional miles of track on the former Southern SB-Line between milepost SB59 in Kershaw and SB91 in Catawba. This doubled L&C’s mileage literally overnight. In 2003, L&C officially purchased this section of the SB-Line. With this, they got the Archer-Daniels-Midland soybean processing plant in Kershaw as a customer.
Beginning in 2005 and lasting through 2007, L&C began retiring its original end-cab switcher fleet in favor of leasing EMD GP38 locomotives from GATX and purchasing three GP38-2s, Nos. 3819, 3820, and 3821.
A Look Ahead
On Sept. 2, 2010, after its textile mills had shut down over the previous decade, Springs Industries announced that it would be selling the Lancaster & Chester Railway Company to Gulf & Ohio Railways. This deal was finalized two months later in November, officially ending more than a century of independence. In the years since the G&O takeover, business continued to increase with the addition of multiple new customers such as Jones Hamilton, Crestwood LPG, Carolina Poly, and several others. In 2016, the railroad purchased its first six-axle locomotives, SD40 tunnel motor No. 6002 and a Dash 8 converted to a slug unit, No. 9146. More six-axle locomotives followed in the coming years.
However, beginning in 2017, G&O began painting new locomotives in the corporate black paint scheme worn by its other three railroads, effectively wiping out the classic blue L&C paint scheme worn by the railroad’s locomotives for more than 60 years. As of 2025, five blue locomotives remain on the roster.
In 2023, E&J Gallo Winery opened its first East Coast production and distribution facility on the L&C, one of the biggest customers in the entire 130 years of the railroad’s existence. However, in May 2025, the ADM soybean processing plant in Kershaw shut down. Even with this traffic hit, the future is very promising for this historic short line, and the railroad should remain successful for many years to come.
One of the hottest days of my working career was spent inspecting the Catawba River Bridge in the mid 1990’s. I was a fresh college grad who grew up in the north and I opened the motel door to 95 degrees and 100% humidity at 6am that morning. The temps went up well north of 100 from there. I was working with a seasoned inspector and a company salesman joined us to “help.” By 8:30am the salesman was swimming in the river to cool off. As a greenhorn I was glad I made it to 1pm before I had to retreat to the truck to cool off. The old head soldiered on until we the inspection around 3pm. I had rejoined the fray after a hour cooling off in the truck. The sales guy provided moral support from the river bank the entire day. Hot and worn out from inspection, the old head gave a nickname to the L&C right there and then. That nickname (too vulgar to share here) has stuck with me ever since, popping into my mind every time I hear or read about the Lancaster & Chester.
A very fine article. Thanks for promoting South Carolina railroads!