Apalachicola Northern Railroad

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Former AN headquarters in Port St. Joe , Florida

The Apalachicola Northern Railroad (AN) was an existing 1903 to 2002 Class 3 shortline - railway company in the US state of Florida , the last one 154 km (96 Miles ) long standard gauge track in the center of Florida Panhandles operation. The company's owner, the St. Joe Company , has been leasing the line to the AN Railway of Genesee and Wyoming since 2002 .

history

The Apalachicola Northern Railroad (AN) was founded on May 9, 1903 to connect Apalachicola to the railway network. On March 21, 1905, the company began building a railway line from Apalachicola north to River Junction , today's Chattahoochee , which was opened in July 1907 for passenger and freight traffic. In River Junction there was a transition to routes of the Seaboard Air Line Railroad to Baldwin (near Jacksonville ) and the Louisville and Nashville Railroad to Pensacola . With the start of operations, however, the AN had to file for bankruptcy, whereupon the company was managed by an insolvency administrator until October 1908 . Nevertheless, on May 10, 1910, a route extension from a track triangle north of Apalachicola west to Port St. Joe was opened. The AN now appeared accordingly under the nickname The Port St. Joe Route . From May 1914 to February 1916 and from May 1932 to December 1936, the AN was again under insolvency administration.

The entrepreneur Alfred I. du Pont , who had bought up numerous properties in Florida since the late 1920s, acquired the insolvent AN and numerous areas in and around Port St. Joe in 1933. Plans to build a paper mill there were continued after du Pont's death by his brother-in-law Edward Ball . With funds from du Pont's inheritance, which was brought into the Alfred I. duPont Testamentary Trust a few years later , the St. Joe Paper Company was founded on May 25, 1936 (since May 1996 only St. Joe Company ), which shortly thereafter began building the work began. On September 30, 1940, the St. Joe Paper Company acquired the AN in order to control the rail connection of their production site itself. Since then, the company has been based in Port St. Joe.

While the passenger traffic of the AN was significantly restricted in the 1940s and stopped in 1955, freight traffic flourished. The paper mill in Port St. Joe and an Arizona Chemical plant, which is also located there, provided the majority of AN's freight volume in the following decades, which in the mid-1990s reached over 45,000 wagons per year. In 1996 the St. Joe Paper Company sold its factory to Florida Coast Paper , which closed the factory temporarily in 1997 and permanently in August 1998.

On September 1, 2002, the AN Railway , founded for this purpose by Rail Management Corporation (RMC), its subsidiary Rail Partners and RMC CEO K. Earl Durden, took over the operation of the Apalachicola Northern Railroad. Since then, AN Railway has been renting the line from the St. Joe Company and has also acquired six locomotives, 148 freight cars and other operating materials from the Apalachicola Northern Railroad.

Infrastructure

The Apalachicola Northern Railroad runs 154 km from Port St. Joe to Chattahoochee. Starting from Port St. Joe, there are intermediate stations on the route: Apalachicola (on a short branch line connected by a track triangle), Borrow Pit and Beverly (both around 46 km from Port St. Joe), Sumatra , Wilma, Vilas , Telogia, Hosford , Greensboro and Hardaway .

vehicles

From the start of operations until the early 1950s, the AN used steam locomotives. These were initially replaced by a diesel multiple unit in passenger transport and then by diesel locomotives in freight transport. In addition, the AN acquired four EMD NW2s in 1947 and seven EMD SW9s in 1952 and 1953 . From this "first generation" the NW2 and part of the SW9 were replaced by eight EMD SW1500s in 1969 and 1970 . In 1982 and 1983, the AN was the only railway company besides C&O to purchase EMD GP15T diesel locomotives . The latter and three of the SW1500s were still in place in 2002 and were sold to the AN Railway.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c d Edward A. Lewis: American Shortline Railway Guide . Kalmbach Publishing, 1996, ISBN 978-0-89024-290-2 , pp. 25 (English).
  2. ^ A b Adam Burns: Apalachicola Northern. In: american-rails.com. 2008, accessed February 12, 2020 .
  3. ↑ Public Health Assessnent former St. Joe Forest Products site (A / K / A St. Joe Paper Mill), Port St. Joe. (PDF) Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry , January 6, 2006, p. 1; 5 , accessed on February 12, 2020 .
  4. ^ A b Surface Transportation Board : AN Railway, LLC-Lease and Operation Exemption-Apalachicola Northern Railroad Company. In: Federal Register . October 22, 2002, accessed February 12, 2020 .
  5. ^ Surface Transportation Board : K. Earl Durden, Rail Management Corporation, and Rail Partners, LP-Continuance in Control Exemption-AN Railway, LLC In: Federal Register . September 18, 2002, accessed February 12, 2020 .