Notes from SavannahSummer 2015

Volume 17, No. 2

Tracking to Tybee

The Savannah News-Press ran a story about Thomas Bordeaux in late June. Thomas, 12, wrote a history of the Tybee railroad and won first prize for the best Georgia history project. The eighth-grader has been fascinated by trains for as long as he can remember.

Courtesy the Savannah Morning News

The train depot at Randolph and President Streets.

Across Randolph St., the arrow points to where the ticket office stood.

The Savannah ticket office was moved in 1988 and now is the ticket office at Ft. Jackson.

The train ended its trip on Inlet Ave., just west of Butler Ave. The engine shuttled its cars off onto a siding and continued until…

…it reached the gravel area across Chatham Ave. where there was a round table. The engine glided onto it, did a 180 and headed back to pick up its cars for the return trip to Savannah.

The main station on Tybee next to the Hotel Tybee. There were four stations altogether beginning at Ft. Screven and eight separate stops.

The hotel was destroyed by fire in 1908 and a new one was built.

New Hotel Tybee from the beach.

An advertisement promoting the Savannah & Atlantic Railroad. D.G. Purse built the railroad (originally the Savannah & Tybee Railroad) and the first train departed Savannah on July 18, 1887. Previously, a trip to Tybee took two hours by steam boat, now it was a forty-five minute ride.

The railroad became part of the Central of Georgia Railway in 1895. Oil burning engines replaced steam driven.

Trains left Savannah and Tybee on an hourly basis: eleven during the week and fourteen on Saturdays and Sundays. Trains ran on Central Time for some reason.

Map from 1897 showing the railroad.

A road to Tybee was completed in 1923 and cost almost $1.2 million. The road opened up serious development opportunities for Whitmarsh, Oatland and Wilmington Islands.

The old Tybee Road just west of the Bull River is pictured above. Willams Seafood, destroyed by fire in 2009, stood just down the road to the right.

The last train to Tybee was on July 31, 1933.

The restaurant sign still stands just before crossing the Bull River bridge.

A median was built down Butler Ave. after the train tracks were removed.

The old train bed, now a hiking and biking trail parallel to the Tybee road, is on McQueen’s Island and ends at Ft. Pulaski.

With all the recent traffic tie ups (this one just west of the Lazaretto Creek bridge), maybe we should think seriously about building a new railroad.

They climbed into the funny, undignified little train, which almost immediately was lurching over red-iron bridges enormously complicated with girders and trusses. Great excitement when they passed Fort Pulaski, a cloud shadow, crossing it, made it somber. He looked out at the interminable green marshes, the flying clouds of rice-birds, the channels of red water lined with red mud, and listened intently to the strange complex rhythm of the wheels on the rails and the prolonged melancholy wail of the whistle.

Conrad Aiken, “Strange Moonlight,” 1926

Happy July 4th from Gus, John and his sisters, Carey and Amy.