Still around and still going strong; the Railroad, not the locomotive, that is.

The locomotive on the front of this post card is a 2-8-4 Berkshire that has

stopped to take on water in Dillonvale, Ohio on June 16, 1955, on the Nickel Plate Railroad. However, the locomotive was originally purchased by the Wheeling & Lake Erie Railway. That company has gone through quite a few changes, but it still exists today. Here is a history of the railway as taken from their website: https://www.wlerwy.com/ The Wheeling & Lake Erie Railway Company is the largest Ohio-based railroad and among the largest regional railroads in the country. Our service area includes 840 miles of track operating in Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Maryland. 1871 Began in order to fulfill the need for a railroad connection between the Wheeling, West Virginia coal fields and Lake Erie port cities and facilities. Initial enthusiasm was offset by capital constraints. 1877 Interest intensifies in transporting Ohio coal to Lake Erie and iron ore from the Lake to steel plants in southeast Ohio. 1913 Main offices were moved to Brewster, Ohio, where they remain today. 1945 W&LE changes hands several times after World War II, leased by Nickel Plate, then controlled by Norfolk & Western, which later merged to become Norfolk Southern. 1990 Norfolk Southern sold W&LE to a group of investors, who renewed the Wheeling & Lake Erie Railway corporate name. The new rail system was now made up of a combination of the former W&LE, the Pittsburgh & West Virginia (PWV) and the Akron, Canton & Youngstown (ACY) lines. The 576 miles of track, combined with trackage rights encompassed 840 miles. 1994 W&LE acquired the former Akron and Barberton Belt Railroad and part of the local Conrail “Cluster” railroad in the greater Akron, Ohio area. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Wheeling Corporation, the Akron Barberton Cluster Railway handles in excess of 10,000 carloads per year for our 25 customers, primarily consisting of traffic in aggregates, chemicals, grain, plastic products, and scrap iron. Today W&LE now handles over 140,000 carloads per year and operates in Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Maryland. The company is private, 100% internally owned, and currently has approximately 425 employees. The post card was published by Audio Visual Designs out of Earlton, New York. AVD was started in 1964 by Carl Sturner for the sole purpose of providing railfans with sound recordings of locos and trains as well as with photochrome postcards of trackside photos. These stunning color images were taken all over the country by some well-known photographers such as David Sweetland. This photo on today’s post card was taken by Bob Collins. The history and product line of AVD can be found on the company's website at www.audiovisualdesigns.com

More about the Publisher than the Train...

This is post card number 163 in Album Number Four of my train post card collection. I had skipped over it in the past thinking that it would be impossible to find any relevant details about either the front or the back. This morning, I discovered that I was wrong on both accounts. The

locomotive on the front of this post card is a 4-6-2 Pacific type of locomotive. Adam Burns of Amercian Rails https://www.american-rails.com/4-6-2.html tells us that "the Pacific Type became one of the most prolific and common steam locomotive designs during the first two decades of the 20th century and was by far the most widely used for passenger service. The 4-6-2's large drivers and high tractive efforts of the time made them ideal for such operations where they could regularly cruise at speeds over 70 mph." The purpose of this post card is to inform your loved ones that you have arrived at your destination "safe and sound". To do this, you simply fill in the hands on the clock with your arrival time; then, write the name of the city at which you have arrived on the line at the bottom and send it off to your family. In this case, it looks like someone arrived at Burlington, Iowa at 11:00 (can't really tell if it is morning or night) and sent the post card to Edith to let her know they are safe.

I cannot say if this train is actually at the Burlington, Iowa train station, but looking at images on line of the old station, I would say "not". Plus, this post card was published in New York City, so I doubt if Sanford Morris Salke, the person who owns the copyright, travelled to Burlington just to take this picture. I found this information about the publisher on line at https://www.laurelcottagegenealogy.com/?p=7904 Someone was doing a geneology search and provided the results at this location. The

double A in the bottom left-hand corner stands for the American Art Production Company. (I have post cards also from the American Art Post Card Company.) But, because the person was dong geneology research on Sanford Salke, we can know that this card was published by the former. The connection to Sanford was made by looking at the graphics around the word "Post Card" at the top of the card.

The design was likely fashioned around “S” for Salke:  You can see how the line continues into an S shape if you follow it under the “For Address Only” printing.

Still Here After All These Years (at least part of it is)...

The Colorado and Southern Railway is one of the West's most fabled lines

even though it spent much of its existence as a subsidiary of the much larger Chicago, Burlington & Quincy system. The C&S was officially incorporated on December 19, 1898 as a means to bring stability to several bankrupt railroads which radiated west, north, and south of Denver. All of this information is taken from the excellent website: https://www.american-rails.com/colorado.html The C&S's earliest predecessor was the Colorado & Clear Creek Railroad, which was chartered on February 9, 1865 as a narrow-gauge mining railroad. The railroad reached its final length in 1884 when it chartered the Georgetown, Breckenridge & Leadville Railway to stretch west of Georgetown and the small mining town of Graymont. The Colorado and Southern Railway (C&S) came about because of the bankruptcy of the Union Pacific on October 13, 1893. Officially, the C&S was born on December 19, 1898 to take over not only the Union Pacific, Denver & Gulf Railway but also the narrow-gauge operations it held. The C&S itself operated for only ten years as a independent company before being purchased by the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy (CB&Q) in 1908. For the Colorado & Southern's part it remained a separate entity from the CB&Q and operated independently, partly due to the fact that Texas law required such and that all railroads operating within its borders be headquartered within the state. Due to the narrow-gauge operations becoming less and less profitable the railroad slowly sold off or abandoned the network piecemeal until the final leg, still in operation to Golden, Colorado, was converted to standard gauge in 1943. In 1980 the line reverted solely to the Burlington Northern ownership. Today this section is still operated to serve the Coors Brewery located there although virtually all the rest of the C&S's once vast narrow-gauge operations are but a memory. The lone exception is a small, 4.5-mile section of the line around Georgetown which today operates as the Georgetown Loop Railroad during the summer months of the year.

This post card was published by Audio-Visual Designs out of Rearlton, New York. It is one of 333 post cards that I have from this publisher. AVD was started in 1964 by Carl Sturner for the sole purpose of providing railfans with sound recordings of locos and trains as well as with photochrome postcards of trackside photos. These stunning color images were taken all over the country by some well-known photographers such as David Sweetland. The history and product line of AVD can be found on the company's website at www.audiovisualdesigns.com

Merry Christmas!!

in Estonian!!

Narrow Gauge in California

This website gives us a lot of good history about the railroad that the locomotive on the front of this post card is working for: https://www.abandonedrails.com/west-side-lumber-company The back of the post card says that it is the West Side Lumber Company, but it wasn't always known by that name. Take a read... Tuolumne to Stanislaus National Forest, CA Home | CA | HH&YV , WSLCRR Note: For more information on the WSLC and its railroad, check out Last of the Three Foot Loggers by Allan Krieg. A railroad that had many names over the years, this three-foot narrow gauge railroad first operated under the name of the Hetch Hetchy & Yosemite Valley Railroad, starting in 1898. As a wholly owned subsidiary of the West Side Flume & Lumber Company, its primary purpose was to haul fresh-cut logs from the vast sugar pine forests of eastern Tuolumne County to the expansive West Side Lumber Mill in Tuolumne City. Here, the logs would be cut into dimensional lumber and transferred to the Sierra Railway of California for shipping. As the years went past, the HH&YV was eventually reorganized and absorbed into its parent company, becoming the West Side Lumber Company Railroad, but all the while its Shays and Heislers continued to run into the rugged backcountry, winding through the multiple canyons and creeks that fed the north fork of the Tuolumne River. For 64 years they ran, until finally in 1962, technology and economic forces caught up with them. By that point, the West Side reigned supreme as the last narrow gauge logging railroad still operating in the American west. In later years, efforts were made to resurrect the mighty West Side as a tourist railroad, spearheaded primarily by Glenn Bell and his "West Side & Cherry Valley Railroad" operation. But the numbers simply didn’t add up, and the WS&CVRR was forced to close its doors in the early 1980s. Today, a portion of the former West Side right-of-way serves as a hiking and equestrian trail. Members of the public can hike from the former station of Friedenberg (approximately milepost one point five by the original railroad timetables), to the station of River (milepost seven), where the tracks crossed the north fork of the Tuolumne on a large wooden trestle. Much of the trackage through this area still remains undisturbed, more than 20 years after the last train rolled by.

Once again the mysterious publisher strikes the blog post. At least in this one he points out that the fireman is sitting on the back of the tender, so he titles the card "Love me tender".

A Big "Boo-Boo" on the back

The front of this post card contains a picture of a Ten-Wheeler (4-6-0)

that was built in the early 1900s. It ran on the Warren & Ouachita Valley Railroad line - a total of 16 mles. This great website gives us the most detail that I could find about the railroad company: https://www.american-rails.com/ark.html I suggest that you visit this website if you have any questions about the history of railroading in the United States. This is what Adam Burns has to say about it: The Warren & Ouachita Valley Railway was jointly owned by the Arkansas Lumber Company and the Southern Lumber Company. It was incorporated in 1899 and began operations around 1901 connecting Banks, Arkansas with Warren, Arkansas a distance of about 16 miles. At both locations the W&OV had connections with Class I lines, the Rock Island at Banks, Arkansas and the St. Louis, Iron Mountain & Southern Railway (StLIM&S) at Warren. The railroad was another of the "tap lines”, hauling the finished lumber products to the Rock Island and StLIM&S. However, it also operated direct logging trains to the mills as well. You can see this same locomtive on a different post card if you go to my blog entry from June 14, 2023.

Again, the post card is published by Railcards.com - the mysterious publisher. However, as I read the back of the post card and compared it to what Adam Burns says above, I think I found an error on the post card. It says that the Warren & Ouachita Valley Railway operated in Alabama. It was actually in Arkansas, as Adam says.

Thank you, Ephraim Shay

Designed by Ephraim Shay, and named after the inventor, the geared locomotive proved to be an invaluable tool in the logging industry. As early as 1872 he began development of a new locomotive that used gears rather than standard rods to propel the device forward. He built the design from the ground up using a flatcar as a base. Upon this he placed a boiler, vertical cylinders, and two-axle trucks on each end. The uniqueness of his design included that essentially the vertical cylinders drive a

horizontal crank shaft attached to drive shafts extending to each truck axle. These axles have gearboxes attached to them which propels the engine forward. Because geared steam locomotives have all of their trucks powered, they provided excellent adhesion enabling them to climb grades well over 5% (something all but unthinkable on main line railroads), although this high adhesion factor limited its top speed to just 18 mph. The flexibility of the design allowed each truck to negotiate the track independently of the other, thus keeping the locomotive on the rails and allowing it to operate over almost any type of track (which was usually nothing more than rails laid directly onto a hillside for most logging operations). The above information was condensed from the article "Shay Locomotives" Which was written (and last revised on May 12, 2023) by Adam Burns. It comes from the website: https://www.american-rails.com/shay.html This website provides the following statistics about Shay Locomotives https://www.shaylocomotives.com/ 2,767 Shays were built over 67 years under four company names. (116 survive) 350 were built by Lima Machine Works between 1878 and April 12, 1892; 1,557 were built by Lima Locomotive & Machine Co. between April 12, 1892 and 1912; 362 were built by Lima Locomotive Corporation between 1912 and March 1916; 498 were built by Lima Locomotive Works, Inc. between March 1916 and 1945; If you rank them by Class, MPH and Speed Range you get the following: 685 were 2-cylinders/2-trucks known as Class A that could travel between 7.7 - 17.5 MPH; 2 were 2-cylinders/3-trucks known as Special that could travel between 14.0 - 16.2 MPH; 1,481 were 3-cylinders/2-trucks known as Class B that could travel between 10.1 - 21.0 MPH; 580 were 3-cylinders/3-trucks known as Class C that could travel between 10.1 - 27.9 MPH; and 20 were 3-cylinders/4-trucks known as Class D that could travel between 18.8 - 26.7 MPH. Once again, I have an interesting post card from a publisher about which I know nothing.