Bigger than Ever!!

The locomotives pictured on the front of this post card are the products of Alco, the American Locomotive Company.

The back of the post card reads: “Three of Genesee & Wyoming Railroad’s Alco 1,000 h.p. locomotives, Numbers 35, 1776, and 42 are shown entering Genesee & Wyoming’s Retsof Freight Yard in Retsof, N.Y. These Units are normally NU’s in order to provide the necessary power to transport salt trains from Retsof to the Caledonia, N.Y. interchange location.” My favourite website about the history of railroads, https://www.american-rails.com/gw.html tells us this: The history of G&W;'s current operations began humbly as a small, short-line by the same name, the Genesee & Wyoming Railroad. This little system was based in Western New York, south of Rochester and began as the Genesee & Wyoming Valley Railway. The G&WV; was incorporated in 1891 and eventually opened from Retsof (where the picture on the front of this post card was taken) to a location known as P&L; Junction near Caledonia in 1894, a distance of about 14 miles. With freight traffic never materializing as hoped the G&WV fell into bankruptcy in November of 1898 and was reorganized as the Genesee & Wyoming Railroad (reporting mark GNWR), incorporated on March 24, 1899. The new G&W was owned by Edward Laton Fuller and began serving a massive salt mine near Retsof, owned by the International Salt Corporation. The mine was, for many years, the largest producer of rock salt in the world and the G&W's largest customer. As it turns out salt remained the railroad's primary source of traffic throughout the 1970s and even today it continues to handle large quantities of the mineral. The modern history of the G&W is continued on the American Rails website. I recommend that you go there to read about it. It leads to the information contained on the current website of the G&W. You can read that and more here: https://www.gwrr.com/about-us/ Genesee & Wyoming Inc. (G&W) owns or leases more than 100 freight railroads throughout North America with 4,000 employees serving 2,000 customers over more than 13,000 track miles. G&W subsidiaries and joint ventures also provide rail service at more than 30 major ports, rail-ferry service between the U.S. Southeast and Mexico, transload services, and railcar switching and repair.

This post card is another of Mary Jayne’s Railroad Specialties post cards in my collection. The photo was taken by Thomas Cottone.