We Are Lucky to Have This Picture

In this post card’s picture, the Alco RS3 locomotives are fresh out of the car wash and are headed back to the yard for their assignments. The picture was taken in 1964, not too many years after the company that owned them, the Erie-Lackawanna, was formed.

On October 17, 1960, the Erie Railroad (ERIE) and the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad (DLW) merged to form the Erie-Lackawanna Railroad (EL). The ERIE originally connected Jersey City, New Jersey to Lake Erie at Dunkirk, New York. It later expanded operations to include Chicago, Illinois. The DLW basically connected Hoboken, New Jersey with Buffalo, New York and primarily was meant to carry anthracite coal from Pennsylvania to markets. Both lines carried passengers along their routes; so they merged those services into one. The DLW lines handled passenger east of Binghamton, New York (halfway between New York City and Buffalo); the ERIE line handled the western part. Starting in 1960 there were some acquisitions, mergers, stock trading and other machinations that eventually led to the Norfolk & Western Railroad owning the EL. Hurricane Agnes caused an estimating to $9.2 million to the railroad, which forced the EL to file for bankruptcy on June 26, 1972. CONRAIL took over EL's operations on April 1, 1976. Conrail's map excluded most of the former Erie main line west of Marion, Ohio. There is a copyrighted (©1985 by Kalmbach Publishing Co.) history of the Erie, the Lackawanna, and the Erie-Lackawanna Railroads at this website: https://erielackhs.org/railroads/

Here is the back of the post card... I would really like to know something about this company.