Some towns, such as Williamsport and Perrysville, managed to participate in canal traffic through the use of side-cuts that brought traffic from the canal across the river. When railroads were constructed starting in the 1850s, they in turn began to render the canals obsolete and allowed trade to reach towns that lacked water connections. The canal continued to be used through the early 1870s. The first trains to run in Warren County operated on portions of the Toledo, Wabash and Western Railway (later the Wabash Railroad) in 1856. The railroad entered the county near Williamsport and was built westward, reaching the western border at State Line City by 1857. West Lebanon was the only other settlement near the railroad's path, but the line bypassed it by about a mile; the town subsequently moved northward to be nearer the station. In 1869 the Indianapolis, Bloomington and Western Railway was built across Mound Township in the southern part of the county. A few years later, in 1872, a branch of the Chicago, Danville and Vincennes Railroad (known as the "Pumpkin Vine Railroad") was built from Bismarck, Illinois, southeast through Warren County; it was built specifically to carry coal from the mines south of Covington. A labor riot at the mines in the late 1870s interrupted the flow of coal, and this combined with the poor financial state of the railroad led to the removal of most of the track by 1880; the remaining portion was removed a few years later. At about this time, in the early 1880s, the Chicago and Indiana Coal Railroad began operating a north–south line through the county. It became part of the Chicago and Eastern Illinois Railroad but was abandoned in 1920 due to financial difficulties; a new company operated the line as the Chicago, Attica and Southern Railroad starting in 1921, but financial problems affected the new company as well and the rails were removed in 1946. Another line, part of the New York Central Railroad, was built through the area in 1903; locally, it ran northeast from Danville into Warren County, then turned north through the small towns of Sloan and Stewart and continued north into Benton County. In the 1970s it became part of Penn Central, then Conrail; operations on the line ceased in the 1990s and the tracks were removed, though a portion running north from Stewart remained and became the Bee Line Railroad which serves the grain processing facility in Stewart. The Wabash Cannonball was a passenger train that ran on the Wabash Railroad between Detroit, Michigan and Saint Louis, Missouri, starting in 1949.