The Apalachicola Northern Railroad (now the AN Railway) was built in order to connect Apalachicola with the outside world at what was then known as River Junction and is now known as the city of Chattahoochee.
I found three sites with information on the road–and they all differ in some details–and the mileage shown in the Guide does not agree with any of that shown in the accounts. The information in various issues of the Guide shows 79.4 miles to Apalachicola, and 102.3 miles to Port St. Joe–and Apalachicola is not on the way to Port St. Joe, and there is no mile post given for the junction (which seems to now be called Apalachicola, according to SPV, which also indicates that the rails into Apalachicola itself have been abandoned. And, none of the websites mentions such an abandonment.
Chartered in 1903, construction was begun in 1905, and was completed to Apalachicola in 1907. In 1910, the 19.8 mile extension to Port St. Joe was completed–which made paper mill traffic, both inbound raw material and outbound paper products, possible. I found
The Meridian and Bigbee River Railroad came into existence as the result of the desire of people in Meridian, Mississippi, who wanted a rail line that went directly east from the city. Meridian already had contact to the northeast via the Alabama Great Southern, but this was not enough. However, it was apparently difficult to arrange financing because, even though the road was chartered in December of 1926, and reached Cromwell, Alabama, thirty miles away (and a connection with the Alabama Tennessee and Northern), in April of 1928, it was not until 1935 that it reached Myrtlewood, Alabama, 51 miles from Meridian. This terminal gave a connecting route to Montgomery that used the L&N to Selma and then the Western Railway of Alabama east of Selma.
Interchanges were with the Southern, IC, and GM&O (now KCS) in Meridian, as well as with the AGS in Cromwell and the L&N in Myrtlewood.
This route was highly useful to the L&N after Hurricane Katrina severely damaged the L&N on the Mississippi coast; it made it possible for run-through service to the UP to be continued via the KCS between Meridian and Shreveport.
In 2006, the M&B itself was damaged in 2007 when a bridge fell under th
Something that hasn’t been mentioned yet is the pre-Civil War 150mph railroad running north almost, if not indeed, on an airline routing from Mobile. I had no idea this even existed until someone brought it up at the little railroad museum in Pine Bluff, even pointing at the general path of the ROW.
This might have been the ‘original version’ of the Mobile and Ohio. Someone who knows more about it than I do should comment. But I thought then, and still do, that it would have been interesting to have true HSR running over a century before it would even be approximated in the richest parts of the Northeast.
By the way, those Central of Georgia ‘Big Apples’ were wartime-mandated copies of Espee GS-2s. There are typical rueful railfan stories that one of them, #451, was this close to preservation but…
Hmm, I had never heard of a proposed 150 mph train even being proposed in the era before 1860.
The M&O was chartered in 1848 to run from Mobile to the Ohio River at Columbus, Kentucky–and it was built so, and was completed 22 April, 1861.
It was as much an “airline” as many other railroads, but veered westward and ran up through Mississippi, veered westward again in Tennessee and again in Kentucky.
Hell of a note when a railroad builds a better Enterprise bridge than the Paramount prop department can half a decade later.
Mike: see what you can find out about that very interesting unit 711. Almost certainly has to be a Krauss-Maffei approach if ‘modern’ in 1961, but I have never heard anything about a passenger proposal – which this is. (It bears a little resemblance to the drawings of the Ingalls mechanoelectrical 2000hp passenger unit … but that would have been obsolescent a whole decade, importantly a whole decade of hydraulic-drive experimentation, before this article appeared.
The double-bubble roof to keep the overall height down is sure to be a giveaway somewhere.
In the late 1950s diesel locomotive technology had reached its limit, and business for the SP was growing rapidly. Freight trains were getting longer and heavier, and SP had to use up to 10 locomotives to power long-distance freight trains. SP’s main workhorses at the time were the F7 and GP9 types, rated at 1,500 and 1,750 horsepower respectively. Although SP had a small fleet of 2,400 horsepower “Trainmaster” locomotives manufactured by Fairbanks-Morse, they were found to have problems that made them unsuitable for freight service and they were relegated to the SF Peninsula Commute trains. After much research, SP decided to experiment with diesel-hydraulic locomotives and stunned the railroading industry by purchasing three 4,000 horsepower ML-4000 type locomotives from German manufacturer Krauss-Maffei. Delivered by boat and unloaded at the Port of Houston, TX, in late 1961, they featured two Maybach 2,000 horsepower diesel engines and a Voith transmission. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
What I’m referring to is the little pencil-drawing illustration of the passenger cab in the 1961 article you posted. It is possible this is just a fantasy drawing, but there are too many strange features that wouldn’t be in a ‘catalog’ passenger locomotive offering even from Alco, and the use of number 711 at least hints at some underlying, now perhaps difficult-to-recover reason for something being numbered in that series. It is not any version of Speed Merchant or RP210 I can recall, and the ‘double bubble’ at the cab windows to decrease the absolute roof height suggests to me some kind of lightweight equipment, right at the high water mark of hydrokinetic transmission design for passenger service…
Think so. The artist AEJ, Alfred Eugene Johnson, Jr., class of '61, also did the cover and the cartoon below. Decades later he wrote something about Walmart.
Having been carried away with movie references elsewhere, I thought I should ask some questions here:
I assume it was the real Sparta used in the closing credits for “Heat of the Night”.
This was one of those strange scenes that was completely unrelated to the rest of the movie, but which was an example of a very complex continuous scene. It starts with a view of Sidney Poitier riding in a moving GM&O coach viewed through the window and progressively pulls back to show the train hauled by a GM&O E unit (all in colour) then further back to show the whole train and then the town from above.
I’d recommend anyone to watch the whole movie just to see the final scene. I liked the whole movie, of course…
The Mississippi Export Railroad is a successful short line that runs 42 miles from Evanston, Mississippi, where it connects with the CN (originally GM&N) to Pascagoula, Mississippi, where it connects with CSX (originally L&N). http://www.mserr.com/
In 1922 the road was incorporated to run from Pascagoula to Luce Farms, which is about two miles from Evanston (the November, 1945, issue of the Guide shows Evanston as having two zero mileposts; one going down to Pascagoula, and the other going to Luce Farms; I could not find Luce Farms, Miss. either in Google or Microsoft searches). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_Export_Railroad
The Columbus and Greenville Railway began life as the Arkansas City & Grenada Railroad on 4 March, 1873–and one year less one day, later was renamed the Greenville, Columbus and Birmingham Railroad. As a 3 foot gauge road, it reached Stoneville (10 miles from Greenville) 4 May, 1878, and from there to a place known as Johnsonville by 2 September, 1881. Apparently this is the extent of its track when the railroad was sold to a subsidiary of the Richmo
At the very end of “part 2” of “the Making of” there are a few seconds of the view from outside the passenger car which began the scene I described. I had no idea that the movie won so many awards. But it was a good movie.
In 1977 Alan Miller dragged me out to Moss Point Mississippi where we checked out the locomotive facilities of the MSE. I think the Alco C420 and the NW5 were there but their pride and joy was a new MP15DC. It was a dull looking unit, black overall with yellow reporting marks and the number on the cab side.
I recall the place being in the middle of nowhere surrounded by scrubby trees.
We saw the big Ingalls shipyard in Pascagoula on the way back, with one of the big landing ships under construction.
On the way there we were pulled over by a local sheriff with a chrome plated pearl handled revolver, because the rental car had Louisiana plates. I showed him my Australian passport and he had fond memories of Australia from WWII so let us go unhindered. Perhaps I hadn’t seen “In the Heat of the Night” at that time.
