When the Canadian Pacific decided to give up operating the Lake Erie & Northern in the late 1980s, the Ontario Radial Railroad Company made an offer for the line and ended up getting the entire line from Waterford north to Preston (the ORRC just wanted Brantford to Preston to connect the Hamilton & Brantford to the Toronto Suburban Railway, but the CPR only offered all or nothing, leaving it up to the ORRC to go through abandonment proceedings for the line segments they didn’t want.)
The ORRC had been considering making an offer on the line for about a dozen years, because they were tired of having to interchange with CPR diesel freights to move cargo between the two railroads and wanted to re-electrify Brantford to Preston and run through freights, so when the CPR accepted their offer they were ready to start putting the wire up.
The line from Brantford south to Simcoe had been almost completely idled before the merger, because industry in both Waterford & Simcoe had all but vanished, the CPR preferred to interchange with the Canada Southern Railway in Welland, and the CNR was trying to abandon their line through Simcoe, so no interchange there.
But after the ORRC took over the LE&N, those interchanges became more important; First, the G&G and CASO had been talking about a merger, and the ORRC would make a good connection between those two railroads (the G&G connected to the TSR in Guelph, the D&B connected to the LE&N in Waterford) and so there was suddenly enough bridge traffic to not only keep the line active, but to purchase the (leased from the TH&B) section that connected Brantford & Waterloo. And secondly, the ORRC wanted to purchase the CNR Air Line from Simcoe east to an interchange with the RailTex line from Jarvis to Nanticoke and, of course, it made no sense to do that unless the LE&N connected down to Simcoe in the first place.
The ORRC actually considered reopening the (long since lifted) section of the line from Simcoe to Port Dover, but the absolute and complete lack of anything resembling an industrial base south of Simcoe wrote that off almost before it was suggested.
It took several years to re-electrify the LE&N, but it was finished by 1992 (just in time for the ORRC to purchase a few Niagara Junction E10Bs when Conrail turned off the overhead on that industrial line.) In 2000, the line was extended by constructing a belt line east of Brantford (the existing TH&B trackage rights meant that through trains had to reverse in Brantford, and clearance under the the old Brantford traction station, which had been converted to the H&B’s headquarters after the CPEL had discontinued passenger service on the LE&N and Grand River Railway, was not sufficient to handle autorack traffic on the ORRC’s newly leased GRNR) but otherwise it has continued to operate unchanged since the wires went up for the second time.