Click the image above to view the Seaboard Air Line Railroad route map, December 1950. Credit: OAR Collection

The Seaboard Air Line Railroad operated a 4,000-mile system serving the area between Richmond, Va. and Miami, Fla. It reached Montgomery over a 337-mile line that extended west from Savannah, Ga. Seaboard’s predecessor in Montgomery dated back to 1884 when the Americus, Preston & Lumpkin RR Co. was chartered to build a narrow gauge line from Americus to Lumpkin, Ga. A 37-mile line was completed between those two points in March 1886. In the following year, the 3-foot-gauge line was extended westward to Louvale, Ga and eastward to Abbeville, Ga. In 1888, the name of the then 105-mile-long road was changed to a more ambitious title: Savannah, Americus & Montgomery Railway Company (SA&M). Two years later, the SA&M completed a 65 mile standard-gauge extension eastward to Lyons, Ga. and the original line was soon converted to standard gauge: four feet, eight and one half inches. The SA&M next turned west, bridging the Chattahoochee River and entering Alabama. The 95-mile extension from Louvale to Alabama’s capital city was completed on December 1,1891. The SA&M thus had a 265-mile mainline between Lyons, Ga. and Montgomery. Its general offices and shops were located in Americus, Ga., and the railroad owned some 24 locomotives.

The Savannah, Americus & Montgomery soon ran into financial difficulties and the road entered receivership in 1892. The line was sold at public auction in 1895 and a new company was formed, the Georgia & Alabama Ry. The newly organized G&A finally reached Savannah in 1896. It styled itself as "The Savannah Short Line" and advertised that it possessed the shortest route between Savannah and Montgomery. Its daily passenger train between the two cities features a buffet parlor car, luxurious equipment for the time.

The Georgia & Alabama managed to turn a profit but its tenure as an independent railroad was short lived. In 1900, it was consolidated with two other railroad systems to form the Seaboard Air Line Railway. The mainline of the consolidated company stretched from Richmond to Tampa, with a major branch from Hamlet, N.C. to Atlanta. The G&A became the Alabama Division of the new Seaboard.

SAL maintained its own freight facility in Montgomery, Clisby Park Yard, about one mile from the Union Station, and its passenger trains used Union Station. But the Alabama Division was Seaboard’s most bucolic operating division. Traffic was skimpy, rails were light, and trains were slow. In 1945, for example, passenger trains on the line to Montgomery were limited to a speed of 40 mph and freights to 35.

Due to weight restrictions on the Chattahoochee River bridge only relatively light steam locomotives could be used. Because of their light axle loading, Seaboard normally assigned 2-10-0 "Decapods" as freight power on the line to Montgomery. Most of the road’s 2-10-0s were so-called "Russian Decapods" - locomotives that had originally been built during World War I to the order of the Czarist Russian government, but which couldn’t be delivered to that country as a result of the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. Some 200 of the machines were assigned to various U.S. railroads by the Federal government, and SAL eventually acquired 37 of the Russian engines. The railroad also acquired additional 2-10-0s of a more modern design. Altogether SAL owned some 51 lightweight Decapods, most of which were used on the Alabama Division. Even after World War II, when Seaboard began to convert the Alabama Division to diesels, it sought lightweight locomotives for use on the Montgomery line, ordering special Alco model RSC-2 locomotives, equipped with six-wheel trucks for light axle loading.

The Montgomery line got a new lease on life on 1928 when Seaboard absorbed the Georgia, Florida & Alabama Railway (GF&A), a little railroad which stretched from Tallahassee, Fla. northward to a junction with the with the Alabama Division at Richland, Ga. Acquisition of the GF&A gave SAL a route from Montgomery, via Richland and Tallahassee, to Jacksonville and a connection with Seaboard’s extensive network of lines in Florida. Montgomery became an important connection point for SAL, especially with the Louisville & Nashville and Mobile & Ohio (later GM&O) for traffic moving between the Midwest and the Sunshine State. In addition, Seaboard and L&N began routing traffic moving between Florida and New Orleans and points west through Montgomery, rather than over the shorter route across the Florida panhandle via Chattahoochee and Pensacola.