6
Business View Magazine
cific (DL). Today, GVT has grown from its original three
miles of track to four rail lines with 318 miles of track,
32 locomotives, 8 terminals, and 68 employees. The
company hauls about 14,000 carloads of freight a
year for more than 75 clients throughout New York
and Pennsylvania. The system handles a large variety
of commodities including grain, forest products, pa-
per, plastic, clay, steel, petroleum and fuel products,
chemicals, coal ash, olive oils, fertilizer, finished prod-
ucts, and more.
According to Monte Verde, some of GVT’s biggest
customers include: “a Cargill flour mill in Mt. Pocono,
Pennsylvania – we do about 4,000 cars of wheat there;
we have an ethanol plant in Medina, New York, called
Western New York Energy - we bring corn into there
for processing. We have a lumber treatment plant in
the Poconos - we bring southern yellow pine and they
pressure treat it and ship it out by truck to all of the
‘big box stores.’ We have a large propane dealer in the
Poconos that we deal with. One of our interesting cus-
tomers – we do about 1,000 cars in Rome, New York
- is Sovena, an olive oil company. They bring boatloads
of olive oil into New Jersey, they tank car it up to Rome.
They have a $187 million, state-of-the-art facility for
bottling and processing olive oil.”
In addition, GVT operates a small, five-mile railroad in
Batavia, New York adjacent to its own 22,000 square
foot, rail and truck Batavia Transload Warehouse,
built in 2009 to accommodate customers who cannot
handle railcars at their own facilities. Monte Verde is
particularly proud of the Batavia operation because it
allowed GVT to recapture customers who had become
habituated, over time, to relying on trucks to haul their
commodities. The warehouse was the brain child of
GVT’s deceased partner Chuck Riedmiller, who envi-
sioned capturing area business that didn’t have direct
rail service. “When we took that over the Batavia track-
age from Conrail, the track was dilapidated and there
were less than 200 cars,” he relates. “Last year, we
did 1,400 cars in Batavia because we worked with the
