Found a lost town by checking old railroad maps

I've been trying to find a place called 'Cedar Switch' that shows up on an 1870s map of Ohio but nothing modern. After months of looking at plat books and census records I got nowhere. Then I dug up a old railroad atlas from 1885 at the library and saw a tiny depot marker right where the map said Cedar Switch was. Turns out the town was just a loading station that got abandoned when the tracks moved in 1902. Has anyone else had luck using railroad maps instead of regular land surveys?

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oliviapatel5h ago

Well that's just typical... I spent three weekends digging through dusty land records and all I needed was a train nerd's old map collection. Sounds like Cedar Switch went the way of most things that depend on railroads, just poof gone when the tracks got bored and wandered off. At least you found it though, beats my luck with a similar ghost town near me that I'm pretty sure only existed in some surveyor's imagination.