CSX has today continued its heritage program with the release of CSXT 1972, an ES44AH honoring the Family Lines System. The locomotive was painted at the railroad’s Waycross, Georgia shops and like it’s heritage brethren, features a cab like most others on the CSX roster before transitioning in to the paint scheme of the honored road.
The Family Lines System can best be compared to the Chessie System, in that it was a holding company that owned several different railroads which each maintained their own identities. These included the Louisville and Nashville, Seaboard Coast Line, Clinchfield, the Georgia Railroad, Atlanta and West Point, and the West Point Route.
Each of these roads were technically separate and thus each locomotive on the “Family Lines roster featured the reporting mark of the road that owned it. However, that was about the only differentiating thing as the locomotives all wore the same paint scheme, much like Chessie did during the same era before the merger to create CSX.
Of that merger, it came about after the roads of the Family Lines came together to form the Seaboard System. The Seaboard System then changed its name to CSX and gobbled up the Chesapeake and Ohio, which by then was the only railroad reminding of the Chessie System, having absorbed the Western Maryland and Baltimore and Ohio prior to becoming a fallen flag itself.