Siblings in Action

The locomotives on the front of this post card are both products of EMD (Electro-Motive Diesel) of General Motors. The lead locomotive is #777, a GP-7; the second one, #200, is a GP-9. Both locomotives are in the livery colours of the Great Smoky Mountains Railway. They are providing the power for an excursion train on Southern Railway's former Murphy Branch. This excerpt from the website of the Great Smoky Mountains Railway tells us the history of the line; https://gsmr.com/history/ The Murphy Branch of the Western North Carolina Railroad delivered thousands of mountaineers from the wilderness of their landlocked hills. A year after iron rails reached Asheville in 1880, workers scattered to the west of the city, digging, filling, and blasting an extension of the line that stretched 116 miles to Murphy, providing thousands with a path to reach the outside world. The iron horse beat riding a wagon, but in many ways the young railroad was still primitive. In 1892, a visitor from Chicago described it as “little more than two streaks of rust and a right-of-way.” With tongue in cheek, he told the Chicago Tribune, “when the wind is just right, the fastest train on the line, the ‘Asheville Cannon Ball,’ can make 10 miles an hour.” Rails changed the way of life for Western North Carolina residents. Mercantile business was commodities for a few of the bare necessities. Conveniences and luxuries were not even dreamed of and cash was hard to come by. The iron rails brought a flood of salesmen who peddled oil lamps that superceded tallow candles and New England “factory cloth” to replace scratchy, uncomfortable homespun. From door to door they sold books, pump organs, enlarged pictures, jewelry, lightning rods, baubles and doodads. Passenger business was so good by the turn of the 20th century that six passenger trains ran every day between Asheville and Lake Junaluska and four daily between Asheville and Murphy. It was not easy to cut this branch line through the mountains. If it had not been for the practical, self-educated engineer Capt. J. W. Wilson, a rigidly honest and industrious man, it might not have been accomplished for years. One of Capt. Wilson’s most challenging tasks was the grade on the west side of the Balsams that was steep and curvy, with gaping ravines. His second obstacle was the 836-foot Cowee Tunnel through a shaky mountain west of Dillsboro. High iron topped the Balsam Mountains at 3,100 feet, at the time the highest elevation of any railroad in the Eastern United States. The railroad was built by convicts working under the gun. In one of the most chilling accidents during construction, 19 inmates drowned in the Tuckasegee River at the mouth of the tunnel. Crossing the river to work, the raft carrying the iron-shackled convicts capsized and all aboard, except for guard Fleet Foster and convict Anderson Drake, died in the waters. Foster was rescued by Drake, who stole the guard’s wallet while pulling him to shore. When the wallet was found in Drake’s duffel, he was whipped and put to work in the tunnel at hard labor instead of receiving a hero’s honor. Those who died were buried in unmarked graves on top of a small hill near the mouth of the tunnel. In the early years of the 20th century, there were a number of runaways on Balsam Mountain and a couple of wrecks inside Cowee Tunnel and in the river, but loss of life was small. As improvements were made to the railroad, accidents declined. The Murphy Branch experienced its heaviest use during wartime, in the early 1940s when the massive Fontana Dam was constructed. Thousands of carloads of cement, equipment, and other materials reached the construction site by rail on a spur line built from Bushnell to Fontana. Huge shipments of copper ore from mines in the western end of North Carolina and Copperhill, Tennessee, increased the line’s tonnage. In the 1920s, ribbons of concrete crawled through the mountains, linking towns together. With the increasing popularity of the automobile, passenger traffic on the Murphy Branch, then owned by the sprawling Southern Railway System, began to decline. Southern discontinued all passenger traffic on the Murphy Branch on July 16th, 1948, ending 64 years of service that had opened Western North Carolina to the outside world. When freight traffic dropped off by 1985, Norfolk Southern closed the Andrews to Murphy leg of the Murphy Branch and the State of North Carolina purchased the Dillsboro to Murphy tracks to keep them from being destroyed. By 1988, many entities had come together to form the Great Smoky Mountains Railway, which then began running passenger excursions. Rolling stock for the GSMR was purchased from various railroads around the nation. The Dillsboro to Nantahala route was one of the most scenic on the Murphy Branch and the excursion trains caught on right away. Upward of 200,000 passengers enjoy the scenery and the experience of a true operational railroad each year aboard passegner excursion trains. American Heritage Railways purchased the GSMR in December of 1999. The Great Smoky Mountains Railway operates today as the newly organized Great Smoky Mountains Railroad.

The picture on the front of the post card is provided by Jim Wrinn; the post card was published by Mary Jayne's Railroad Specialties in 1994.

Still Going Strong after all these Years

The locomotive on the front of this post card is a GP-7M, owned by the

Altlana & St. Andrews Bay Railroad, at that time. Things have changed for the railroad since this picture was taken in 1972. This website provides a full history of the railroad. I have excerpted parts of it below. https://www.american-rails.com/asab.html The Atlanta & St. Andrews Bay Railway (A&StAB) was incorporated on February 14, 1906, by A. B. Steele, a noted lumberman based in Atlanta. Steele had recently purchased large tracts of land south of Dothan, Alabama and was attempting to have the timber transported by rail to a newly established port in the Northern Panhandle of Florida. Working with another lumber magnate, R.L. McKenzie, who owned tracts of land in Florida the two agreed to complete the railroad to the Gulf Coast at the small town of Harrison, later renamed Panama City. The first 30 miles between Dothan and Cottondale (Florida) were constructed very quickly and neared Panama City by late 1906. However, the final 11 miles to the coast became controversial when the E. E. Saunders Company did not want to grant the railroad access over its property. Eventually, this issue was settled, and the line was completed in 1908 consisting of 81 miles. The A&StAB boasted three interchange partners along its system; two were located at its northern terminus of Dothan (Central of Georgia and Atlantic Coast Line) while another with the Louisville & Nashville was established at Cottondale. In 1930 it was acquired by the International Paper Company, which maintained control for the next several decades. Both World Wars proved fruitful for the railroad in terms of traffic; after the second World War A&StAB still moved a substantial level of freight, enabling it to earn Class I status by January of 1947. That same year it fully dieselized its fleet of thirteen Alco RS1s, a pair of S2s, and a single F3A. Other new diesels purchased later were all Electro-Motive products including GP7s, SD9s, a GP39, a GP40, and a trio of GP38-2s. In 1994 the railroad was sold to the Rail Management Corporation, which officially renamed it as the Bay Line Railroad. On the first of June, 2005 Genesee & Wyoming took over the system and continues to operate it today.

The post card was published by the ever elusive Railcards.com company out of Alameda, California

A Beautiful GP-7 in a Beautiful Setting

In the past two weeks I have written about the GP-7 locomotives on the fronts of those post cards. Today’s locomotive is also a GP-7 locomotive.

Instead of adding more information about the locomotive, I am going to share some background about the railroad line on which this train is operating. It is crossing the Moat Brook Trestle enroute to the station in Conway, New Hampshire. The railroad on which it is running is called the Conway Scenic Railroad. Our friends at Wikipedia tell us the following about the Railroad. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway_Scenic_Railroad The Conway Scenic Railroad was formed by Dwight Smith, who was an employee of the Boston and Maine Railroad in the late 1960s. After years of negotiations, Smith was able to convince his employer to sell a portion of the Conway Branch, which it planned to abandon, to him and two local businessmen in 1974, and the Conway Scenic Railroad began that year. In 1999, the original owners were bought out by husband and wife Russ and Dot Seybold and on January 30, 2018, the railroad was sold again to Profile Mountain Holdings Corp. Today, the railroad operates over two historic railway routes: a line from North Conway to Conway that was formerly part of the Conway Branch of the Boston and Maine Railroad, and a line from North Conway through Crawford Notch to Fabyan that was once part of the Mountain Division of the Maine Central Railroad. The Conway line is owned by Conway Scenic and leases the Mountain Division that is owned by the State of New Hampshire. The railroad's main terminal is in historic downtown North Conway in the Mount Washington valley. The North Conway station complex has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1979. The railroad operates passenger trains out of its station in North Conway Village year-round. The railroad also operates the Mountaineer train from North Conway, through Crawford Notch up to Fabyan Station from May through November each year.

The photo on the post card was provided by Dennis Adams and published by Mary Jayne’s Railroad Specialities in 1997.

Faux Geep 20

Last week I wrote about the very popular Geep 7 locomotive by EMD. These locomotives were so popular that some railroad companies went to extreme lengths to stretch their useful lives. The locomotive on the front of

this post card is an example of this happening - not to a Geep 7, but to a Geep 9. The EMD GP9 is a four-axle diesel-electric locomotive built by General Motors' Electro-Motive Division between 1954 and 1963. The GP9 succeeded the GP7 as the second model of EMD's General Purpose (GP) line, incorporating a new sixteen-cylinder engine which generated 1,750 horsepower, as opposed to the 1500 horsepower in the Geep 7. During the 1970s, to extend lives of aging fleets of GP7s and GP9s, many railroads rebuilt and upgraded them, changing their appearance in the process. Milwarukee Road converted 54 GP9s like this one, their #950, calling them "GP20s". But, a GP20 plaque does not a GP 20 make. EMD did make a GP20C-ECO, but that is not what this is. See this for details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMD_GP20C-ECO I include the scan of the back of this post card, just out of habit. I know nothing of the publisher: www.railcards.com