St. Marys Express

The St. Marys Express runs on the St. Marys Railroad, a Georgia short line founded in 1865 by Captain Lemuel Johnson and chartered by the state as the St. Mary's and Kingsland Railroad, incorporated on October 24, 1906. The line later became the Atlantic, Waycross and Northern; after Johnson's death it was sold in January 1918 to Savannah's Southern Fertilizer and Chemical Company, then in 1939 to the Gilman Paper Company–St. Marys Kraft Corporation, taking the St. Marys Railroad name it still carries. The railroad bought its first diesel, No. 500 — nicknamed 'the Goat' — in 1945, and a decade later built a four-mile spur to the Army's Kings Bay ammunition depot, the site that became Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay. Ownership churned through the Durango Paper era around the turn of the millennium, and the mill's 2002 closure put the railroad's future in doubt, but the line survived intact and was purchased in January 2007 by Birmingham-based Boatright Companies. Today the railroad remains a fully operational Class III freight carrier on its 11-mile route, interchanging with the First Coast Railroad at Kingsland and maintaining its own locomotives and cars at a fully equipped shop in St. Marys — heritage that the railroad's excursion trains let visitors experience firsthand.