Love Those Alcos

Thanks to the foresight of Homer McGee, the president of the railway, the Green Bay Route loaded up on Alco-built locomotives and entered into the world of railroad competition with the "big boys". The front of this post card shows one of those Alcos at work leaving Green Bay, Wisconsin. The following information was gleaned from the website: http://www.greenbayroute.com/

The Green Bay and Western Railroad was a paper carrying line and bridge route operating between the Mississippi River at Winona, Minnesota and Lake Michigan at Kewaunee, Wisconsin, via Green Bay. It was chartered in 1866 as the Green Bay and Lake Pepin to provide an outlet for the region's timber and agriculture. In 1853 a charter was granted to the Green Bay & Minnesota Railroad sufficient capital was never raised, however, and the railroad never was built. On April 12, 1866 a charter was granted to the Green Bay & Lake Pepin Railway (GB&LP) and construction of a route actually began in 1869. By January of 1872 regular service began between Green Bay and New London, a total route of forty miles. The railway finally reached the banks of the Mississippi River in East Winona, Wisconsin in December 1873. The GB&LP changed its name to the Green Bay & Minnesota Railroad (GB&M) in 1873 and fell under the control of Eastern railroad interests. The GB&M fell into receivership and was sold in foreclosure in 1881 to the Green Bay, Winona, & Saint Paul Railroad, which was created for the sole purpose of taking over the old company. Financial problems continued to plague the railroad and the line went into bankruptcy, emerging as the newly formed Green Bay & Western (GB&W) in May 1896. The Green Bay Route operated as sleepy backwoods railroad until the arrival of Homer McGee as President in 1934. His twenty-eight year tenure saw a massive program to improve the line, such as replacing all untreated softwood ties with treated hardwood, smoothing out grades to speed operations, and replacing old lightweight rail with ninety pound sections to enable the railroad to operate at speeds in excess of sixty-five miles per hour. Marginal branch lines were abandoned, the one was sold to outside interests, and another was fully merged into the GB&W. Under McGee's guidance the GB&W transformed itself into a high-speed bridge route powered by a modern fleet of Alco diesel locomotives, linking the upper Midwest with the East Coast via the Lake Michigan car ferries. By the 1960's over forty percent of all traffic on the Green Bay Route was overhead traffic, originating and terminating off line. The main commodity was forest and agricultural products shipped east and automobiles and auto parts shipped west. Increasing competition from highways and large-scale railroad mergers began to cut into the Green Bay Route's traffic and the writing was on the wall. The success of the railroad was dependent on the Kewaunee ferry which ceased operation in 1990. On August 27, 1993 the assets of the GB&W and the FRVR were merged into the Fox Valley & Western Railroad which was a subsidiary of the Wisconsin Central Transportation Corporation. Much of the rolling stock had their reporting marks painted over with WC subsidiary Sault Sainte Marie Bridge Company (SSAM). The remaining assets of the FV&W were merged into the Canadian National Railway along with parent WC on October 9, 2001. The actual Green Bay and Western Railroad Company still survives, though only as a shell.

The post card was published by RAILCARDS.COM out of Alameda, California. The webite does not exist any more, so I presume that the company went out of business. This is one of two hundred and four post cards that I have from this publisher. It is the third largest group of post cards in my collection.