The original Lake Erie & Northern was piecewise abandoned in the late 1980s, but instead of ripping up the track those pieces were sold to the new ORRC to keep their connection to each other (and to the Michigan Central in Waterford.) To keep the finances of this line separate they also purchased the corporate shell of the Lake Erie & Northern to operate these lines.
One high priority reason the ORRC had when purchasing the Brantford to Preston section of the ex-LE&N was to put wire up again so they didn’t need to either keep diesels on the roster or wait for a CPR train to transfer interline freight between the Hamilton & Brantford & Toronto Suburban, and thanks to fairly large stock purchases from the owners of the Ontario Southwestern & the Parsons Vale Trust they were not only able to do that but were also able to reelectrify the entire line from Preston to Port Dover.
The Simcoe to Port Dover section had been the weakest part of the LE&N for many years (it was the first section that the CPR abandoned) and even the promises of putting on passenger service from Toronto & Brantford (in and around the car-happy Golden Horseshoe? That’s a triumph of wishful thinking for you!) didn’t encourage significant freight traffic, thus it never once broke even. So when the Simcoe Railway Historical Society had a similar fit of optimism and asked if they could run excursion trains from Simcoe to Dover, they were offered, to their surprise, a lease on the entire line for the princely sum of one CAD/year.
The rest of the railway continues to operate.