Carolina Piedmont 2079 helps bring a short train off of the BASF spur in Simpsonville, South Carolina on November 8, 2022. CPDR 2079 is an EMD GP3802 built as Chicago & Northwestern (CNW) 4613 in 1979, then sold to National Railway Equipment where it became NREX 3881, to Chicago, Fort Wayne and Eastern (CFE) 3881, to CPDR 3881, to CPDR 2079 when it received the GWI orange and yellow paint.
What is now the Carolina Piedmont Railroad has a long history of mergers and acquisitions. It began as the Greenville and Laurens Railroad. The Greenville and Laurens was chartered in 1878 and arrived in Greenville in 1882. The railroad was later merged with three others in the region to form the Port Royal and Western Carolina Railway in October 1886. Ten years later, the railroad merged with the Port Royal and Augusta Railway to create the Charleston and Western Carolina Railway, which was in turn acquired by the Atlantic Coast Line in 1897.
The ACL merged with the Seaboard Airline Line in 1967 to become Seaboard Coastline and the SCL was merged into the Seaboard System in 1983. The final merger came in 1986, when the Seaboard System was merged into CSX Transportation.
