Georgia State Railroad Museum
Near Tybee Island, Georgia
What you are near right now is the most complete antebellum railroad complex still standing in the United States. The Georgia State Railroad Museum occupies the original heavy repair shops of the Central of Georgia Railway, and the bulk of it was built in eighteen fifty-three and eighteen fifty-five, which means it is older than the Civil War and has survived everything that came after.
The Central of Georgia was chartered in eighteen thirty-three to connect Savannah with Macon, roughly a hundred and ninety miles inland. By the eighteen fifties it was one of the most profitable railroads in the South, and these shops were its mechanical heart. Locomotives were overhauled here. Wheels were re-flanged, boilers repaired, cars rebuilt. The centerpiece was a massive roundhouse with an operational turntable at its center, a large rotating platform that allowed steam engines to be swung around and directed into any of the maintenance bays. Steam locomotives could only be driven forward with any reliability, so a turntable was not a convenience, it was a necessity.
When William Tecumseh Sherman marched his army through Georgia in the winter of eighteen sixty-four, he systematically destroyed the Confederate rail network, tearing up track, burning bridges, and heating rails over bonfires until the iron softened enough to be twisted around trees, creating what soldiers called Sherman's neckties. The Central of Georgia lost a hundred and forty miles of track, fourteen locomotives, and ninety-seven cars. But the Savannah shops themselves were largely spared when the city surrendered without a major battle in December of eighteen sixty-four.
The roundhouse's original brick smokestack still stands, a hundred and twenty-five feet tall, visible from a distance. Thirteen of the original structures remain. The turntable still turns. When the Southern Railway absorbed the Central of Georgia in nineteen sixty-three, the city of Savannah eventually took over the complex, and it was declared a National Historic Landmark in nineteen seventy-six. It opened as a museum in nineteen eighty-nine, and the steam and silence of the place has not gone anywhere.
