When the Adrian & Blissfield was purchased and made part of the CSS&SB system, the Charlotte Southern Railroad came along with the deal. The CHS had been idled for about a decade, except for a dinner train that was teetering on its last legs (and which died soon thereafter, thanks to the plague), but there was one small shipper remaining on the line – a grain elevator on the east end of the line that was doing a tiny amount of business by truck.
The new ADBF (plus parent CSS&SB and grandparent PV&T) met with the grain elevator and managed to coax it – and the roughly 250 carloads of traffic it handled – back onto the rails, and freight started to operate on the line again. Initially, the railroad used GE 44 ton #3 to serve the elevator, but #3 was fairly elderly and by 2023 the ADBF needed to either have it remanufactured or replaced with new power.
However, CHS #3 was not just a GE 44 ton locomotive, but the very last one manufactured, so the ADBF chose to donate it to a railroad museum and replace it with a newly remanufactured SW923 from the BAR’s Derby Shops.
As of 2026, the CHS is operating #4 to and from the grain elevator, and is (fruitlessly) trying to solicit other businesses to locate along the line. The dinner train is long gone, but there are very occasional railfan trips across the line when the CHS can borrow a passenger car.