The Cincinnati and Eastern Railway (C&E), a railroad from Idlewild in Norwood, near Cincinnati, to Portsmouth, Ohio. At its western terminus, it connected with the Cincinnati, Lebanon and Northern (CL&N) and the Pennsylvania Railroad Richmond Division (PRR), and to a Norfolk & Western line at its eastern terminus.
The C&E was chartered as the Cincinnati, Batavia & Williamsburg on January 11, 1876, but the name was changed and the projected route was extended to Portsmouth in May. In October 1876, the line opened from Batavia Junction to Batavia, a distance of 15 miles. By August of next year, the railroad had reached Winchester, a distance of 48 miles.
In June, a 5.5-mile western extension to the Miami Valley Railroad, later the CL&N Idlewild, opened. It was constructed to the Miami Valley Railroad, who had promised a narrow-gauge connection via the Deer Creek valley to Cincinnati. When the Deer Creek tunnel project ran into financial difficulties, the C&E found that its connection to Cincinnati was completely useless for four years. The railroad went into receivership from January 1879 to 1881 due to failures to collect stock subscriptions.
At a meeting in November 1880, the shareholders voted to increase the capital stock from $500,000 to $2 million and to authorize a bond issue to connect the railroad to Portsmouth and beyond to Gallipolis. In 1882, trackage rights were secured via the Deer Creek valley to Court Street in Cincinnati.
By the end of 1882, the C&E had reached Peebles, 72 miles from the Court Street depot. The railroad had reached Rarden by May 1883, Henley in late July and Portsmouth in 1884, which included a 1,000-foot truss bridge over the Scioto River.
The railroad was sold to the Cincinnati, Hamilton & Dayton (CH&D) in 1886, although it soon defaulted and sold to the Ohio & Northwestern Railroad (O&NW). The O&NW went into receivership shortly after, although the railroad completed five miles of the long-projected Gallipolis extension from Portsmouth to Sciotoville in 1889.
The O&NW reorganized under the Cincinnati, Portsmouth & Virginia Railroad (CP&V) in 1891, which merged with the Norfolk & Western (N&W) in October 1901.
In 1913, the Scioto River Bridge was replaced with a multi-span truss constructed by the American Bridge Company. Other trestle replacements included the construction of a girder span over Dry Run in 1941 by the Virginia Bridge Company. In 1947, the N&W east of Peebles to Jaybird via Jaybird Creek was realigned when a quarry opened along Plum Run that required the railroad to be rerouted to the north and east. It included a new trestle above Cedar Fork and several miles of new track.
In 1982, the N&W consolidated with the Southern Railway to form the Norfolk Southern Corporation, and the railroad became the Norfolk Southern (NS). The NS railbanked the line east of Peebles to Vera Junction at Portsmouth in 2003.