[1] The 5 ft (1,524 mm) gauge railroad opened in 1845 with J. Edgar Thomson as its Chief Engineer and Richard Peters as its first Superintendent.

[4] At the time, goods from the Mississippi and Ohio valleys had to go by riverboat to New Orleans and then via coastal steamships around the Florida Keys, to get to the big population centers in the Northeast.

The bankers used some of their wealth to buy controlling interests in the Atlanta & West Point Railroad (A&WP) and the Western Railway of Alabama (WofA), which provided a continuous line from Atlanta to Montgomery, Alabama, although the WofA was standard gauge, while all the other lines in the South were broad gauge.

The Georgia Railroad even resorted to temporarily abandoning the Athens branch to secure enough rail to reopen its main line.

After their defeat, returning Confederate soldiers were given free rides home, to the extent that the company's limited rail network would allow.

The Georgia Railroad Freight Depot, designed by architect Max Corput, was completed in 1869 and is the oldest building in Downtown Atlanta.

Following the Panic of 1896, the Central went into receivership and its portion of the lease lapsed, whereupon it was eventually reassigned to the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad (ACL).

In 1902, the ACL acquired controlling interest in the L&N; thus the Georgia, A&WP, and WofA became non-operating subsidiaries of the Atlantic Coast Line.

Soon the ACL came to dominate the Augusta interchange traffic, through its Charleston and Western Carolina Railway subsidiary and via the ACL's spur from its main line at Florence, South Carolina, in order that the Georgia Railroad could compete with the Seaboard Air Line Railroad and Southern Railway for traffic from Atlanta up the Eastern seaboard.

[8][9] A unique feature of the Georgia Railroad and Banking Company charter was that the state legislature gave the corporation large tax breaks, which were legally challenged on several occasions.

The Georgia was among the last railroads to operate both freight and inter-city passenger trains in the "Lower 48" states, into the Amtrak era.

The same year, Georgia Railroad Bank was acquired by First Union; most former branches are now part of Wells Fargo.