History
The Greenwich and Johnsonville Railway (G&J) was incorporated in the early part of the 20th century, and became a subsidiary of the Delaware and Hudson Railway (D&H). It connected to the D&H's Washington Branch at Greenwich Junction. Following the 1980 closure of the Georgia Pacific pulp and paper mill in Thomson, New York, the D&H planned to abandon the G&J along with the adjoining Washington Branch, which ran from Eagle Bridge, New York to Castleton, Vermont. In 1982, Mohawk-Hudson Transportation, owned by Ron Crowd, purchased the railroad from the D&H, forming the Batten Kill Railroad. Crowd had the distinction of being the first African-American to own and operate a railroad in the United States.
While initially financially successful, a series of national railroad strikes in the mid 1980s left the railroad in a less profitable state. In 1994, the railroad was turned over to NE New York Rail, a non-profit, and the BKRR remained the operator. Passenger excurisions were started, but were terminated by 2004 due to declining ridership. In November 2008, William Taber purchased the Batten Kill from Mohawk Transportation and the estate of the late Ron Crowd. Tabor is the current President and CEO of the railroad.
Read more about this topic: Batten Kill Railroad
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“All history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)