Here, Kitty, Kitty, Kitty!!

The three locomotives featured on the front of this post card are hauling coal. The train has just crossed the summit of the Allegheny Mountains and

is entering the yards at Clifton Forge, Virginia. It will now have a down grade run along the James River to the Tidewater Area of Virginia. The train is operated by the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad. Its earliest ancestor was the Louisa Railroad, which was incorporated on February 18, 1836. It’s first leg of track of 22 miles was quickly completed by December of 1837. Today, the trackage of the C&O is part of CSX Transportation. This website gives us the following details about the locomotives themselves: https://www.trains-and-railroads.com/ge-u30-b The GE U30B was a diesel-electric locomotive produced by GE Transportation between 1966 and 1975. It was a further development of the U28B, with a 3,000 hp (2,200 kW) 16-cylinder prime mover. The U30B competed with the EMD GP40 and the ALCO Century 430, but was not as successful as the GE U30C. The U30-B was manufactured between 1966 and 1976. They were of the C-C wheel configuration, which means that each truck had 3 powered axels They were 67 feet and 3 inches long with a service weight and adhesive weight of 363,000 pounds. It provided 91, 650 pound force of starting effort and could reach a top speed of 70 miles per hour. The engine that drove this was a V-16 diesel described officially as a GE-FDL-16 and the fuel tank held 3,000 gallons of diesel. All of this provided 3,000 horsepower to the train; it was the first GE manufactured locomotive to offer this. The U30B experienced several upgrades over the life of the production run. I have featured a couple of those changes in the previous two blog posts. About the title of this blog post and logo of the railroad: Wikipedia tells us that Chessie was a popular cat character used as a symbol of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway (C&O). Derived from an etching by Viennese artist Guido Grünewald, the image first appeared in a black and white advertisement in the September 1933 issue of Fortune magazine with the slogan "Sleep Like a Kitten." The advertisement makes no mention of the cat's name. When the ad generated a positive response, the railroad developed an advertising campaign around the image and chose the name Chessie as a derivation of the railroad's name.

The picture was taken by Mary Jayne Rowe and she is also the publisher of the post card. I have 243 of her post cards in my collection. As I was collecting the post cards, I noticed that her name appeared quite often. In fact, the only publisher from whom I have more post cards is Audio Visual Designs (333). I wrote to her and asked if she had a catalogue of her post cards; she sent me 42 pages!!