TTM site

Texas Transportation Museum

11731 Wetmore Road, San Antonio, TX 78247
(210)490-3554

The Longhorn & Western Railroad

Miscellaneous Longhorn & Western items

TRACK WORK

Track work is an essential part of all railroading. It is also both unglamorous and back breaking work. When TTM moved to this site in 1969 it was a completely undeveloped part of what was then called the north east preserve. The bulk of the area has become McAllister Park. Both the museum and the adjacent Gunn Sports Park use sections of the land as part of the San Antonio parks system. Track work began here long before we had any equipment to put on it. It would be quite some time before our 0-4-0 switcher, #1, would be moved from our former location down town.

Modern railroads use enormous amounts of equipment to lay and maintain track. Although the former mainline of the Missouri Pacific, still in use, only now by Union Pacific, is tantalizingly close to the museum, just across the road in fact, we have never managed to get a connection to it. We get to see all the latest equipment in use so close and yet so far. We do everything the old fashioned way and have very little in the way of equipment.

While there may be some intrinsic value in taking part in such work using the most traditional methods, it is, surprise, surprise, quite hard to find volunteers to do it. It is also requires trained supervisors. Much of the work is simple hard toil but it is essential to get it right. Our railroad may not be as long as others but its just as wide and, all things considered, carries far more people than modern railroads than concentrate almost exclusively on freight traffic.

Missouri Pacific Flat Car

Another unglamorous yet extremely useful piece of railroad equipment at the museum is a flat car that was originally used by the Missouri Pacific railroad. Its hard to imagine something simpler or plainer, or more useful. We use it to spray the tracks, to keep weeds away. We install a large tank of weed killer on the back with a special delivery system, designed to spray both down and to the side. We also use it to move gravel, ties, rail and construction equipment.

Salado Junction railroad phone booth

This old railroad phone booth stood on the Southern Pacific lines between San Antonio and Victoria. Such concrete booths had locked doors and were exclusively for the use of railroad personnel, and there would be a special padlock on the door to keep unwanted folks out. Ours no longer has its door, nor does it have its telephone. There is a similar structure at the railroad museum in New Braunfels which is more complete. We got our through the good offices of former S.P. track supervisor, Pat Budd, who has been a museum volunteer for many years.

Southern Pacific Standard Clock

Pat also acquired this old "Standard Time Clock," which used to be in a depot in New Mexico. Standardized time and time zones are a gift to the world from the earliest days of railroading. If each town or area ran its clocks even a few minutes apart, it could and in fact did lead to horrendous accidents, as trains would be allowed to enter the same stretch of rail by track controllers who genuinely thought it was clear, which it should have been, according to their schedule. A variance of just ten minutes at different points could have horrific consequences.

Mail pick up & drop off stand

Delivery of mail became infinitely faster and more reliable with the advent of regular train schedules. Smaller post offices might not rank an actual stop, as it would obviously take for ever for any train to stop every few miles. So equipment was devised to allow for mail to be picked up and dropped off while the trains were in motion. This particular mail stand stood just a few hundred yards from the museum, at the corner of Wetmore and Thousand Oaks. To this day the old, completely unmodernized, post office is still there, doing business as if it was the 1920s. Regrettably, the old depot which was also there is long gone. This stand's claim to fame and a place in history books is that it was the last one ever used for such mail operations in the USA, an event that occurred in the early 1960s.

Further L & W RR Pages

Click on the links below to the main areas of the Longhorn & Western Railroad. Pages are set up to reflect the main areas of activity, such as Locomotives, Carriages, Cabooses, The Depot and Motor Cars.

•TTM Home Page•
•Hours of Operation & Location•

•Locomotives•
•Railroad Carriages;
•Cabooses•
•The Depot•
•Motor Cars•
•Miscellaneous L&W items•