Central of Georgia Railroad HO Scale Models

The Central of Georgia Railroad traces its origins to 1833, when it was chartered as the Central Rail Road and Canal Company of Georgia. Reorganized under a revised name to attract outside investment capital, the railroad was constructed to link the port city of Savannah with Macon, a journey that took builders from 1837 to 1843 to complete, reaching only the eastern bank of the Ocmulgee River at first, as a bridge into Macon itself was not finished until 1851. The completed line formed a critical artery connecting Atlantic seaports to the interior of Georgia, and when joined with the Macon and Western Railroad, provided a continuous rail corridor stretching northward toward Chattanooga on the Tennessee River. Over the following decades the railroad aggressively expanded through leases and acquisitions, absorbing dozens of smaller carriers across Georgia and Alabama, including the Southwestern Railroad in 1869, the Montgomery and Eufaula Railroad in 1879, and the Columbus and Western Railroad in 1888, among many others, building a network that ultimately spanned approximately 1,764 route miles by the mid-1950s. The railroad endured considerable corporate turbulence throughout its history. In 1888 the Richmond Terminal Company, a Virginia-based holding company, took control, and the financial instability of that arrangement drove the Central into bankruptcy and foreclosure. It emerged from reorganization on November 1, 1895, reconstituted as the Central of Georgia Railway. Railroad financier E. H. Harriman acquired a controlling interest in 1907 and two years later transferred that interest to the Illinois Central Railroad, which he also controlled at the time. The Great Depression proved another severe test, sending the railway into receivership in 1932, a condition from which it did not fully recover until 1948. The St. Louis-San Francisco Railway, known as the Frisco, gained control in 1956 with the intention of securing an outlet to Atlantic ports, but the Interstate Commerce Commission refused to sanction an outright merger of the two systems, and the Frisco sold its holdings to the Southern Railway in 1963. The Central of Georgia became a Southern Railway subsidiary on June 17, 1963, and in 1971 Southern created the Central of Georgia Railroad as a corporate entity to consolidate the Central of Georgia Railway, the Savannah and Atlanta Railway, and the Wrightsville and Tennille Railroad under a single reporting structure. The railroad carried the reporting mark CGA in this later corporate form. When Norfolk Southern Railway was created through the merger of Southern Railway and Norfolk and Western Railway in 1982, the Central of Georgia was absorbed into that system. In passenger service the road had been notable for trains including the Nancy Hanks II, which operated between Atlanta and Savannah via Macon from 1947 until 1971, and the Man o' War, which served the Columbus to Atlanta corridor over the same period. Both trains were named for celebrated racehorses, a nod to the railroad's deep roots in the agricultural and cultural traditions of the Deep South. Today the Central of Georgia survives only as a paper railroad within the Norfolk Southern corporate family, its former lines now operated as integral parts of that system's southeastern network. Several of its historic properties have been preserved and recognized on the National Register of Historic Places, most notably the Savannah Shops and Terminal Facilities, which now serve as the Georgia State Railroad Museum and the Savannah History Museum. Norfolk Southern honored the railroad's legacy in 2012 by painting a GE ES44AC locomotive in the distinctive Central of Georgia diesel color scheme as part of a broader program commemorating predecessor roads. The Central of Georgia's long history, spanning from antebellum Georgia through the consolidation era of the late twentieth century, reflects the broader arc of Southern railroad development and the steady concentration of rail operations into large regional systems.