By 1850 the Louisa had been built east to Richmond and west to Charlottesville, and in keeping with its new and larger vision, was renamed the Virginia Central Railroad.

[1] Huntington intended to connect the C&O with his Western and Midwestern holdings, but ended up stopping construction at the Ohio River.

Because the mineral resources of West Virginia and Kentucky hadn’t been fully realized yet, the C&O suffered through the bad times brought on by the financial panic Depression of 1873, and went into receivership in 1878.

In 1881 the Peninsula Extension was completed from Richmond to the new city of Newport News located on Hampton Roads, the East’s largest ice-free port.

From 1900 to 1920 most of the C&O’s line tapping the rich bituminous coal fields of West Virginia and Kentucky were completed, and the C&O as it was known throughout the rest of the 20th Century was essentially in place.

Another large shop site was established at Clifton Forge, Virginia in 1890 on 1,200 acres of land, including the classification yard.

Today Amtrak's tri-weekly Cardinal passenger train follows the historic and scenic route of the C&O through the New River Gorge in one of the more rugged sections of West Virginia.

However, it did have a number of well known passenger trains including the George Washington, Fast Flying Virginian, Sportsman, Pere Marquette, and Resort Special.

Much of the reason for the popularity of C&O's passenger trains was because of Chessie, the sleeping kitten, one of the most successful and fondly remembered marketing campaigns ever developed.

While the kitten was created by the Austrian artist Guido Grünewald, the success of Chessie as a marketing tool is often credited to Lionel Probert, at the time an assistant to the C&O president.

[citation needed] C&O continued to be one of the more profitable and financially sound railways in the United States, and in 1963, under the guidance of Cyrus S. Eaton, helped start the modern merger era by "affiliating" with the Baltimore & Ohio.