During the Pennsylvania Railroad years, the line mainly hosted coal and mineral trains from the Ohio River Valley area that were bound for Cleveland.

The line also hosted passenger trains between the charter railroad's namesake cities, notably The Buckeye Limited (later renamed The Clevelander) and the Steeler.

Conrail was created in 1976 to pick up the pieces of several railroads that had fallen into bankruptcy, which largely included the Penn Central.

Around this time, Conrail began an extensive double tracking and upgrading of the former C&P between Alliance and Cleveland to accommodate for a planned increase in train traffic.

Conrail had planned to reroute all of its Chicago bound train traffic that had used the Fort Wayne Line up to that point, opting instead to reroute that traffic to the former NYC Water Level route to the north, using the former C&P as the bridge line between the two routes.