Wadley & Mount Vernon 4-4-0 "American" Locomotives in the USA

Class 108 (Locobase 12714)

Data from DeGolyer, Volume 27, p. 37. See also Scott Thompson's article in Dublin, Georgia's Courier Herald, archived in []. Works numbers were 24230 in April 1904 and 24723 in September.

The W & MV was a 36-mile Georgia short-line that Thompson notes "...brought about brief, but vital and long lasting, spurts to the towns and communities where its tracks ran. When it was gone, those towns [Rockledge, Adrian and Kite] were never the same again."

Thompson tells us that Wadley was on the Central of Georgia while Mount Vernon was served by the Savannah, Americus & Montgomery.

In 1905 the Central of Georgia bought up the assets of the W & MV, merged them with the Stillmore Air Line Railway, and renamed the result the Wadley Southern. According to Georgia Railroad History site ([]), the two main elements were the 53-mile Wadley to Collins line and the Wadley to Rockledge line.

As the line "lived and breathed with the timber industry," exhaustion of the forests after about 25 years spelled doom for the WS. See the Courier Herald's comments in which a correspondent reports on the bankruptcy sale of a circus -- including its menagerie -- in 1889.