Business View Magazine - June 2016 101
they had stopped service on it. So, we put a proposal
in to operate that.” At the time, the line was owned
by Erie County which ultimately decided to grant the
lease to the Group’s new subsidiary, the Depew, Lan-
caster & Western Railroad. “We brought one of our lo-
comotives over there, but there were very few carloads
available to us,” he says. “ConAgra had a flour mill on
the waterfront that was being switched by Conrail and
they wanted some service. We won that contract and
we got into that business. And it grew from there.”
The next year, GVT bought the Lowville & Beaver River
Railroad (L&BR) in New York’s Adirondack Mountains
region. In 1991, it expanded again when it acquired
another 124 miles of former Conrail trackage. “Sixty
percent of the revenues on that railroad were con-
sumed by New York state property taxes,” Monte Verde
explains. “It didn’t allow anything for labor, mainte-
nance, and upkeep and it was a big losing issue for
them. So we purchased what became the Mohawk,
Adirondack & Northern running out of Utica and up in
the Adirondacks.” The MA&N operates in the foothills
of the Adirondack Mountains with terminals in Utica,
Carthage, and Lowville, New York, where it connects
with the L&BR. In 1993, GVT was presented with its
first opportunity to operate outside New York State
when the company was the successful bidder to run
the Lackawanna County Rail Authority’s rail lines in
the industrial areas of Lackawanna and Monroe coun-
ties near Scranton, Pennsylvania. GVT’s Delaware-
Lackawanna Railroad (DL) began serving this region in
August of 1993, and now operates over 100 miles of
trackage north and east from the Scranton terminal,
into the Pocono Mountains and on into the Delaware
Water Gap. Finally, it 1996, GVT incorporated the Falls
Road Railroad (FRR) to acquire more Conrail track and
now operates a forty-five mile rail line from Lockport to
Brockport, New York. GVT’s Class 1 interchange part-
ners are CSX Transportation (MA&N, FRR, and DL&W),
Norfolk Southern (DL and DL&W) and Canadian Pa-
