This Railroad Sounds Dangerous!!!

The Batten Kill Railroad (reporting mark BKRR) is a class III railroad operating in New York. That is the name of the railroad on which the locomotive and passenger cars on the front of this post card are operating. The BKRR was formed in 1982 beginning operations on October 22 on a pair of abandoned Delaware and Hudson Railway branch lines, totaling about 30 miles of track. The information in this blog is taken from our friends at Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batten_Kill_Railroad The Greenwich and Johnsonville Railway (G&J) was incorporated in the late part of the 19th century, and built a rail line between Greenwich and Johnsonville, New York. Around 1900, G&J became a subsidiary of the Delaware and Hudson Railway (D&H). By 1907, the G&J (with support from parent D&H) had built a branch from Greenwich to Greenwich Junction (just south of Salem) where it connected to the D&H's Washington Branch that was built circa 1856. The old G&J route to Johnsonville was abandoned in July 1932 and all traffic henceforth went via "The Junction" in Salem. Most of the abandoned section to Johnsonville eventually became County Route 74. Following the 1980 closure of the Georgia Pacific pulp & paper mill in Thomson, New York, the D&H planned to abandon the G&J along with the adjoining Washington Branch, which ran from Eagle Bridge, New York to Castleton, Vermont. In 1982, Mohawk-Hudson Transportation, owned by Ron Crowd, purchased the railroad from the D&H, forming the Batten Kill Railroad. Crowd had the distinction of being the first African-American to own and operate a railroad in the United States. While initially financially successful, a series of national railroad strikes in the mid-1980s left the railroad in a less profitable state. In 1994, the railroad was turned over to NE New York Rail, a non-profit, and the BKRR remained the operator. Passenger excursions were started, but were terminated by late 2003 due to declining ridership. In November 2008, William Taber purchased the Batten Kill from Mohawk Transportation and the estate of the late Ron Crowd. Taber is the current President and CEO of the railroad. There is an informative article about the Batten Kell Railroad on line at Railfan.com Here is a link to connect you to more information about it. https://railfan.com/batten-kill-railroad-at-40/ Here is a teaser taken from the article to get you to go read the rest of the article: "Bucolic Washington County, a place that once inspired Shaughnessy and renowned painter Grandma Moses, is the setting for one of railroading’s most improbable short line survivors. Forty years after these lines were given up for dead, Batten Kill is surviving — if not thriving — in the modern age. And it’s doing so with a fleet of historic Alco locomotives built just a few valleys over in downtown Schenectady."

The picture on the front of this post card was taken by James Conroy. I could not find anything definitive on the internet about him, so I simply honour his name here. The post card was published by Audio Visual Designs in Herkimer, New York. This post card is one of 333 from this company. They are the biggest supplier of the post cards in my collection.