Heart of Georgia Railroad
railway line in the United States of America
The Heart of Georgia Railroad (reporting mark HOG) is a shortline railroad created in 1999 to lease and operate 177 miles (285 km) of track owned by the Georgia Department of Transportation between Mahrt, Alabama and Vidalia, Georgia, in the United States. The railroad has since expanded to include around 227 miles (365 km) of track, reaching as far as Midville, Georgia. Initially only the portion from Rochelle to Preston, Georgia was utilized, with the Preston-Mahrt and Rochelle-Vidalia lines out of service. The Heart of Georgia also hosts the SAM passenger excursion train and is owned by parent company Atlantic Western Transportation Company.
Primary commodities include feed products, chemicals, plastic pellets, aggregates, lumber, grain, pulpwood, scrap metal, and fertilizer, amounting to around 7,500 annual carloads.
History
An east–west route from Vidalia to Mahrt forms the core of the Heart of Georgia railroad and was built in segments over a period of several years. The Americus, Preston & Lumpkin was started in 1884 and connected its namesake cities by 1887. Also in 1887 further extension brought the terminus of the railroad further east to Abbeville. In 1888 the railroad became the Savannah, Americus & Montgomery. The railroad continued to grow in 1890, reaching Lyons in the east, as well as the Chattahoochee River, and eventually Montgomery to the west.
“Heart of Georgia Railroad” enters the record as railway line in the United States of America. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Heart, Georgia and Railroad can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5692273. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1999, 1884, 1887 and 1888.
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This entry incorporates text from “Heart of Georgia Railroad” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.