Batten Kill Railroad
| Batten Kill Railroad | |
|---|---|
| legal form | Corporation |
| founding | 1982 |
| Seat |
Greenwich , New York ,
|
| Branch | Rail transport |
The Batten Kill Railroad ( AAR reporting as mark: BKRR) is a Class-3 local railroad - railway company in the northeast of the State of New York . The company operates rail freight transport on routes with a total length of 52.1 km .
history
In the 1960s and 1970s, the freight traffic of the Delaware and Hudson Railway (D&H) on the Castleton – Eagle Bridge line and the connection to Thomson of the D&H subsidiary Greenwich and Johnsonville Railway (G&J) branching off from it near Salem gradually decreased. A significant proportion of freight was lost in 1980 with the closure of the Georgia Pacific Iroquois Pulp and Paper mill in Thomson . Necessary investments were not made due to the difficult financial situation of D&H, so that D&H finally applied for closure in 1981 and closed sections in November 1981 for technical reasons.
A locally based entrepreneur, Ron Crowd, founded Mohawk-Hudson Transportation and its subsidiary Batten Kill Railroad, named after the Batten Kill , in 1981 with other shareholders . Mohawk-Hudson held 90% of the shares in the crowd-run Batten Kill Railroad when it was founded in August 1981, while the agricultural trading company Agway held the remaining 10%. The infrastructure of G&H and the Salem – Eagle Bridge section of D&H were sold on July 9, 1982 to the Eagle Bridge – Thomson Development Corporation , a subsidiary of the Urban Development Corporation of New York State. The tracks were then rented to the Batten Kill Railroad. The state granted a $ 1.8 million grant for the initial repair. The D&H line north of Salem was not put back into operation and was dismantled.
The Batten Kill Railroad began operating on October 22, 1982. In addition to freight transport, excursion passenger transport was also offered under the name Batten Kill Rambler from 1983 . In 1994, the route infrastructure was transferred from the Eagle Bridge-Thomson Development Corporation to the non-profit Northeastern New York Railroad Preservation Group , which also took over the passenger cars and one of the rail company's two locomotives. The management remained unchanged with the Batten Kill Railroad. In 2003, the excursion trips were suspended until further notice, after the number of passengers dropped from 16,300 in 1997 to 3,000 in 2002. After Crowd's death on March 30, 2008, his longtime employee William Taber took over the management of the Batten Kill Railroad and acquired the company in November 2008 from Mohawk-Hudson Transportation.
Infrastructure
The rail infrastructure used by the Batten Kill Railroad includes the almost 30 km long southern section Salem - Cambridge - Eagle Bridge of the Castleton - Eagle Bridge railway line , the 16.2 km long former Salem Branch of the G&J to Greenwich and branching off in Greenwich Junction near Salem the remaining part of the Greenwich – Thomson section of the G&J line that once led to Schuylerville . However, the latter section has been unused for years.
traffic
The freight transport of the Batten Kill Railroad mainly comprises the transport of feed grain, fertilizers, wood and pulp. In 1983 906 freight wagons were transported, in the first half of the 1990s fewer than 500 per year. The interest group Railroads of New York (RONY) currently names 413 cars per year. The transition to the rest of the American rail network takes place in Eagle Bridge, where the Batten Kill Railroad connects to the infrastructure of Pan Am Railways . The freight wagons are not swapped with Pan Am, but with D&H owner Canadian Pacific Railway , which reaches Eagle Bridge via Trackage Rights .
The railway company has two ALCO RS-3 diesel locomotives available for traction , one of which belongs to the Batten Kill Railroad itself and one to the Northeastern New York Railroad Preservation Group.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Harold Faber: Upstate Railroad That Holds Its Own . In: New York Times . June 14, 1984.
- ^ A b c Edward A. Lewis: American Shortline Railway Guide . Kalmbach Publishing, 1996, ISBN 978-0-89024-290-2 , pp. 38 .
- ^ Moody's Transportation Manual . Moody's Investors Service, 1989, p. 278 : "On July 9, 1982 all the physical assets of the Co. were sold to Eagle Bridge-Thomson Development Corporation, a subsidiary of the New York Urban Development Corporation. The physical rail was in turn leased to (...) Batten Kill Railroad "
- ^ Alan Wechsler: They stay in it for the short-haul . In: Chicago Tribune . September 18, 2005.
- ↑ Ronald Edward Crowd . In: The Post-Star . April 1, 2008: "Ronald Edward Crowd, 57, (...) was placed in the hands of the Lord on Sunday, March 30, 2008. (...) He was the first African-American to own a railroad in the United States. "
- ↑ Batten Kill Railroad Inc. Railroads of New York (RONY), 2018, accessed December 23, 2018 .