ATLANTA -- Sixteen months after departing the Cyclorama at Grant Park, the 1856 Texas locomotive is due to return to Atlanta on Wednesday, May 3, to its new home at the Atlanta History Center.
The 53,000-pound Texas is a relic of Atlanta’s early railroading days and well-known for its role in the Civil War’s great locomotive chase.
The locomotive will be delivered on a lowboy tractor trailer, with its 20,000-pound tender arriving on a flatbed tractor trailer. They will be lifted off of the trucks by a 110-ton crane, and placed on the same tracks that held them since 1927 at Grant Park.
The Texas and the General, now at the Southern Museum of Civil War and Locomotive History in Kennesaw, are the only surviving locomotives that once served the Western & Atlantic Railroad, a company key in Atlanta’s early development.
