Before the start of the Civil War, Georgia had ten railroads, five of which figured significantly in General William T. Sherman's Atlanta Campaign and March to the Sea. The number of rail lines in the state ballooned after the war. Many were founded by individual entrepreneurs like Henry Plant and Thomas Clyde, while the biggest railroad of them all (Southern Railway) was created out of whole cloth by New York financier J.P. Morgan. At the close of the nineteenth century, consolidation was already in process, and by the end of the next century, only three significant railroads remained in Georgia. Author and historian Robert C. Jones examines Georgia's rail history over the past two centuries and today.
Robert C. Jones served as president of the Kennesaw Historical Society for twenty-one years (1994–2015) and also as a member of the executive board of the Kennesaw Museum Foundation for seventeen years (1998–2015). The Museum Foundation helped fund the forty-five-thousand-square-foot Southern Museum of Civil War and Locomotive History in Kennesaw, Georgia. Robert is also an ordained elder in the Presbyterian Church. He has written more than forty books on historical themes, including A Guide to the Civil War in Alabama, A Guide to the Civil War in Georgia and The Battle of Allatoona Pass: The Forgotten Battle of Sherman's Atlanta Campaign.