A Stab in the Dark

I am sort of going out on a limb with this one. Neither on the front nor on the back is there an indication of the name of the railroad on which this locomotive is traveling. The caption on the picture does tell us that it is following the Kentucky River – in Kentucky.

I am guessing that, because this post card was mailed in 1919, this train was on the original Lexington & Ohio Railroad tracks that were, at that time, owned by the Louisville & Nashville Railroad. All of this speculation comes from internet research. A bit of the information came from this website: https://www.american-rails.com Kentucky railroads date back to 1830, just three years after our nation's first common-carrier, the Baltimore & Ohio was chartered, when the Lexington & Ohio Railroad was chartered to connect Frankfort with Lexington, a distance of about 31 miles. The railroad was able to complete the line by 1834 and by 1851 had connected Louisville along the banks of the Ohio River. The company would eventually become part of the Louisville & Nashville (L&N) system and today, its original line is still operating by RJ Corman, a diversified railroad business which owns several shortlines in Kentucky, Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and other southern states. Some more information came from this website: http://www.lnrr.org/History.aspx One of the L&N's most important expansions came early in the 1900s, when the railroad pushed its tracks deep into the coal fields surrounding Hazard and Harlan in eastern Kentucky. Acquisition in 1909 of two smaller lines and construction in 1911 and 1912 of more than 150 miles of track along the Cumberland River and the North Fork of the Kentucky River gave the L&N access to the landlocked bituminous coal riches of eastern Kentucky. In the preceding decades, the L&N built additional rail lines, not only in eastern Kentucky, but in western Kentucky,Tennessee and Alabama, to help develop new coal production points. And then, back to this one: https://www.american-rails.com The Louisville and Nashville Railroad served the heart of the Southeast from New Orleans and Memphis to Atlanta and the Florida Panhandle. It also extended to St. Louis and later reached Chicago. The L&N carries precedence as one of the few to maintain its originally chartered name, operating for more than 120 years as the Louisville & Nashville.

The post card was printed by Curt Otto Teich. That is his logo in the bottom-middle of the post card. Also, the code “A-23958” fits into the codes used by the company between 1912 and 1925. The company was founded by Curt Otto Teich (1877 - 1974), who immigrated to the United States from Lobenstein, Germany in 1896. At the peak of production, the company could print several million postcards in a single day. The Curt Teich Company operated from 1898 to 1978 and saved examples of every image they produced. In 1982, the bulk of the collection—more than 350,000+ images relating to 10,000 towns and cities across the United States, Canada, and 85 other countries—was donated by the Teich family to the Lake County Discovery Museum in Wauconda, Illinois. The collection is available to the public. If planning to visit the museum, call ahead to make an appointment, which will provide staff assistance and access to the collection. A portion of the collection can be searched online at "Digital Past".