L&N in Clark County: Three landmarks

This arti­cle focus­es on three Clark County land­marks on L&N’s rail lines that are no longer there.  Two were promi­nent parts of the local com­mu­ni­ty.  The third was not well known except to rail­road buffs.

To begin with the least known land­mark: On the Patio-Ford line, L&N trains passed through a cut that had once been the site of Tunnel 7 near Ford.  Kentucky Central Railroad built the tun­nel for their line that opened in 1883.  L&N lat­er “day­light­ed” the tun­nel to pro­vide room for dou­ble-track­ing the line to Ford.  The line in recent years was tran­si­tioned back to sin­gle line.

The William C. Dale Power Station was East Kentucky Power Coöperative’s elec­tric gen­er­at­ing plant at Ford.  The plant was built to sup­ply elec­tric­i­ty to EKPC’s 18 mem­ber co-ops that serve the rur­al areas of Kentucky.  Before the coop­er­a­tives came to Kentucky, only 3 per­cent of rur­al homes had elec­tric service.

The four units at Dale had a gen­er­at­ing capac­i­ty of 196 megawatts.  The first unit came on line in 1951.  Its coal-fired boil­ers were fed Eastern Kentucky coal deliv­ered by L&N trains.  In the 2010s Dale faced the need to install expen­sive emis­sion con­trol sys­tems at its aging plant in order to meet fed­er­al air qual­i­ty stan­dards.  Economics dic­tat­ed that the plant be retired from ser­vice.  It shut down oper­a­tions in 2016 and was demol­ished in 2019.

The build­ing that per­haps caused the great­est uproar in Winchester when it was razed was the old rail­road sta­tion on Depot Street.  Union Depot was built in 1906 as a joint pas­sen­ger sta­tion for the L&N and C&O rail­roads.  In the ear­ly 20^th cen­tu­ry, Winchester could count twen­ty-two pas­sen­ger trains daily.

In 1971 all pas­sen­ger ser­vice to Winchester end­ed, and the old sta­tion began to fall into dis­re­pair.  In 1981 the city was nego­ti­at­ing with L&N offi­cials about acquir­ing the old depot.  A devel­op­er had expressed inter­est in con­vert­ing the sta­tion to a restau­rant.  The front page sto­ry in the Winchester Sun for Monday, July 27, 1981, report­ed that “an L&N crew, begin­ning before day­light on a fog­gy Saturday morn­ing, lev­eled the build­ing.”  The depot was destroyed with­out notice and “came as a com­plete sur­prise to cit­i­zens and officials.”