The Chester section was leased to the Charlotte, Columbia and Augusta Railroad, which built a wooden bridge across the Catawba and extended the track one mile (1.6 km) beyond Lancaster in 1883.
The receivers for the Richmond and Danville operated the line from Lancaster to Lenoir as one railroad but neglected to pay expenses.
Its buyer, Colonel Leroy Springs, renamed the line the Lancaster and Chester Railroad and organized a company to run it.
In addition to Leroy Springs, the incorporators of the new railroad were William Ganson, R. C. McManus, W. T. Gregory, L. C. Payseur, James M. Heath and W. H. Hardin.
His interest in purchasing the line may have stemmed in part from the fact that his father, Andrew Baxter Springs, had been one of the contractors and directors for the Charlotte, Columbia and Augusta Railroad, which helped form the towns of Rock Hill and Fort Mill, South Carolina.
Springs' brother was president of the Atlantic, Tennessee and Ohio Railroad (AT&O) that proceeded from Charlotte to Taylorsville before it ran out of capital.
When he would refer to the AT&O in front of fellow businessmen, Springs would claim to be president of the Lancaster, Klondike and Manila Western Railroad.
Two weeks after the Hooper Creek derailment, a fire destroyed the Lancaster Depot, which also served as a warehouse for the mill, costing the railway an additional $75,000.
In 1939, he brought the L&C national attention when he purchased the Loretto, a rail car that had originally been built for the former president of U.S. Steel, Charles M. Schwab.
Springs carefully preserved the splendor of the forty-year-old car's Victorian design—Cuban mahogany paneling, crystal chandelier, velvet draperies, marble bath, and gold-plated beds.
This menu included: Long Island Ugly Duckling stuffed with Turnip Greens and Pearl Onions, Cannibal Sandwich with real collar buttons, Pork Barrel stuffed with Republican, Drawn and Quartered Democrat Roasted in Own Jacket, and Elliott Springs with Garlic and Chlorophyll.
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 one of these fictional vice-presidents was Ham Fisher, who seldom drew a freight train in his Joe Palooka strip without labeling it Lancaster and Chester.
They included The Shrinking Violet, The Black Label, The Purple Cow, The Red Rose, The White Horse and The Blue Blazes.
When Springs moved into his office at the new company headquarters in Fort Mill, he found himself with a four-foot-high (1.2 m) and 120-foot-long (37 m) blank space on his walls.
These 65-ton Whitcomb locomotives had seen service in Italy during the war and burned about the same amount of oil to run that the old steam engines used for lubrication.
These locomotives handled the traffic on the line—much of the time making two freight runs a day—until December, 1984, when an additional EMD SW900 was added to the fleet and given the number 92.
The New Hope and Ivyland Railroad restored their Baldwin steam engine 2-8-0 #40 to her original appearance as a 1920s-era freight locomotive when she worked for the Lancaster and Chester.
Steam Trains Inc., a Pennsylvanian group of investors, bought the 2-8-0 and had it shipped to the Reading roundhouse in Wilmington, Delaware.
On September 2, 2010, Gulf and Ohio Railways announced it was purchasing the Lancaster and Chester; the deal was planned to be completed by November 2010.
The Railway invested heavily in its own line in the late 1990s, spending close to nine million dollars over a three- to five-year period.
In addition, the railroad tripled their locomotive fleet in that time period going from three units in 1996 to a total of nine by the end of the decade.
Thyssen, which recently opened a second plant on the line, takes inbound coils of sheet steel and slits them for various industries, such as stampings for automobiles, lawn mowers and refrigerators.
For volume of cars, the largest customer on the line was at one time GAF at a section of track in East Chester near the CSX interchange.
PPG manufactures 70 million pounds (32,000 metric tons) of fiber material annually that is used in such diverse products as computers and surfboards.
Once every week to ten days, the L&C gets unit trains from Ohio for the Circle S Feed Mill now at Milepost 17 between Fort Lawn and Richburg.
Both Norfolk Southern and CSX were vying for Circle S. But the L&C convinced the owner of the plant to locate on the L&C by making him see that, according to Steve Gedney, president of the L&C, 'he could have the best of both worlds here,' a reference to being able to choose the best rate between both Class 1 carriers that the L&C connects with.
In all, the Railway handles about 14,000 cars a year in steel, coal, chemicals, glass, fiberglass, sand, corn, barley, soybeans and lumber.
"I think the main thing is our presence and having our operating headquarters in this area", Steve Gedney, the president of the railroad told this reporter.
The purchase of the former SB line in Lancaster has fueled speculation on whether the L&C will ever make it into Catawba or Rock Hill where interchange with CSX could be easier for Kershaw.