Sandersville Railroad
The Sandersville Railroad was originally operated from Tennille, Georgia, to Sandersville, Georgia and chartered in 1893 as a subsidiary of the Central of Georgia Railroad. Location It was extended north five miles from Sandersville to a kaolin mine and processing plants near Deepstep, GA. It continues to operate the same nine miles as of 2017 along with two branch lines and is nicknamed The Kaolin Road. The company has its main office, dispatchers, locomotive and railcar maintenance shops, maintenance-of-way equipment shed, and locomotive fuel towers and sanding tower, all located in historic downtown Sandersville, Georgia. Equipment The Sandersville Railroad Company owns a fleet of modern diesel electric switcher locomotives built by the Electro Motive Division of General Motors Corporation (EMD) but their first Diesel Electric Locomotive was the Fairbanks-Morse H-12-44 numbered SAN 100 that's now been long retired. They have 4 EMD SW1500s with the road numbers SAN 1100, 1300, 1400, and 1500 respectively. The newest addition to the fleet is an EMD MP15DC purchased in October 2016 from Norfolk Southern Railroad, it has the road number SAN 1600 and was bought to replace the EMD SW1200 Road Number SAN 1200 that was sold in the spring of 2018. The SAN 1600 is as of July 2018 still in its Norfolk Southern style black and white paint but now has the Sandersville Railroad style paint job with the road number SAN 1600 to align with the rest of the fleet. The EMD SW1500 SAN 1400 was also originally a Norfolk Southern locomotive and was delivered in the black and white just as the SAN 1600 but has now been repainted to the standard Sandersville Railroad Company paint scheme of a white body with a red single stripe running along both sides of the hood ending near the belt driven radiator fan on the front of the units, with the word Sandersville in red on both sides, and red road numbers and reporting marks SAN in red on the cabs in the style of the old Seaboard Air Line Railroad. The company also owns two slug units which the SAN refers to as "boosters". The first one is a former Rock Island Railroad Company GE (General Electric)-built Universal Series U25B road Switcher that was turned from a conventional locomotive to a Road Slug later in its life. The operators cab, auxiliary cab, diesel engine (prime mover), air compressor, and radiator were all removed from the frame, and a large concrete ballast block was installed along with a new long full length hood was installed that has electric powered traction motor blowers on each end to cool the 4 DC electric traction motors on each axle as it did when it was a regular engine. The cab has headlights on each end and a ratchet style handbrake on the B-end. The fuel tank of the engine was removed and it became a full road slug that now receives its power from whatever mother unit it is multi-unit (MU) connected to. The Rock