The San Antonio and Aransas Pass
Presented by the Longhorn Chapter of the N.R.H.S., based at
TEXAS TRANSPORTATION MUSEUM
11731 Wetmore Road, San Antonio, TX 78247
(210)490-3554
A link to the museum's web site home page is at the bottom of this page
The San Antonio & Aransas Pass, known to most folks as "The SAAP," or "SAP," has a remarkable
story. Begun as a local independent in 1884, it is the only of two railroads that was formed in San
Antonio itself. It was created to connect San Antonio with a closer deep water port than
Galveston. Service from there had begun just a few years earlier, in 1877.
Many San Antonio city leaders, however, thought that competition was needed with this line
built by the Galveston Harrisburg & San Antonio Railroad, which had already become,
essentially, a subsidiary part of the Southern Pacific empire. They thought the S.P.'s monopoly
on coastal rail service was both very expensive and failing to bring prosperity to the city.
Another factor was that Corpus Christi Bay was simply closer to San Antonio. Furthermore, the
route was all but undeveloped and there existed great potential for profitable enterprises and
new towns along the way.
The first town reached by the SA & AP was Floresville. This was achieved in 1886. Floresville
was created when news of the railroad's arrival was announced. The company
owned three Baldwin locomotives, all second hand 2-6-0s, which they named the "Sam Maverick,"
the "Chas Hugo," and the "M. Kenedy," after significant supporters and company officers.
The "SAP" also owned five passenger cars. The first port reached by the fledgling railroad
was Corpus Christi, in 1887, not Aransas Pass, which was eventually reached in 1889. Building on this
success the SA & AP then spread north from San Antonio into the Hill Country, reaching as far as
Kerrville. At the same time it also created an alternative route to Houston. This did not sit
well with the Southern Pacific RR at all. Eventually the "SAP" would extend as far north
as Waco. In time the focal point of the railroad became Yoakum, where the railroad had its repair
shops.
The railroad was chartered on 8/28/1884, and really only existed as a true independent until
1890. Uriah Lott was the driving force behind the railroad. He had built the Tex Mex
railroad, first as a narrow gauge, then widened to standard gauge, and came to the "SAP"
after the initial surveys had already been made but no actual construction begun. He was a man
of considerable drive and vision, but was never a wealthy man. He was
originally from New York and he must have been a phenomenal sales man. The SA & AP got started with just one mile of
track, which Lott himself and some other company officials helped to build, engaging in the task
of laying track in the Texas heat themselves to create interest and attract more money. Most of
the first mile was made with rails and ties previously used by other railroads, and a retired
old steam engine that had been on its way to the scrap heap.
The depot, opened in 1886, though not as grand as other San Antonio stations, was a very
practical building for an efficient district railroad. Its only "frill" was the "steeple" on
the frontage corner. It had two floors and provided a center overhanging eave create shade.
The main entrance was on the south side facing the tracks. The ground floor contained the
waiting, baggage and express rooms. There was a lunch counter in the northwest corner.
Above were offices for the Superintendent, dispatchers, trainmaster and clerks. It also held
the telegraph office. Teddy Roosevelt left from this depot with his Rough Riders on 5/30/1898, and the
station was used in a 1925 movie about them. Only about 120 feet of the movie still exists, in
the Library of Congress. Remarkably that is about the same minute fraction that remains of the
depot. Some booths in the Little Rhein Steak House, 231 S. Alamo, have the benches from
the depot as seats.
With the successful completion of the first mile, the railroad got four more miles of track from
a San Antonio street car company. With this in place, it then managed to
wrangle ten more miles of track from a Pennsylvania steel company. These achievements led to
more interest and the railroad was off. The first round trip was made to and from Floresville, some 30 miles to
the south. A new railroad in a new direction is quite a thing to observe and crowds thronged to
see the "new" train in both towns. Having got this far, all the initial money was gone and the
railroad might have died if Lott had not traveled back to Corpus Christi, where he had once
briefly run a store, to see Mifflin Kenedy, who had helped to finance the Tex-Mex. With
Kenedy as a backer, the destination switched from Aransas Pass to Corpus Christi. Neither yet had
deep water port facilities. It had been thought that Aransas Pass was the more likely candidate
but Corpus Christi ended up winning the distinction. Now that the railroad was
on better financial terms it began to expand rapidly. Corpus Christi, then still
a small town of around 2,000, was reached in November 1886. When Lott had gone there to obtain
Kenedy's assistance, he had had to travel there first by train to Galveston, on the rival"
Galveston, Harrisburg & San Antonio RR, and then by ship to Corpus Christi. The new
direct link between San Antonio and Corpus Christi was obviously a quantum improvement.
For more information about the history of rail service to Floresville, click
•FLORESVILLE•
For more information about the history of rail service to Poth, click
•POTH•
For images of the SA & AP in Beeville and Skidmore, click
•Beeville and Skidmore•
The SA & AP is the railroad that killed the town of Helena, once the county seat of
Karnes County, but now a tiny ghost town, a not so wide spot on a quiet back road. A colorful
legend exists about how this happened and as it is not inconsistent with the known facts, it is
quite fun to repeat it. Essentially, towns had to pay substantial amounts if the railroad was to
provide it with service. Payment would need to be in the form of land for a depot
and the right of way for the rails, plus good old fashioned cash, of course. Some form of
inducement for the railroad was expected and necessary, to cover construction expenses. Towns
knew there would be many benefits that would follow the railroad's arrival. For example, Corpus
Christi, which only had a population of around 2,000 people, had to pay the "SAP"
$102,950, this figure having been determined by the railroad. (If you see how the task of reaching
Corpus was achieved, including the number of massive bridges, you'd have to say the got a huge
bargain.) Helena was levied $60,000 and when it was not forthcoming the line was simply laid in
the direction of towns that did pay, such as Karnes City, which supplanted Helena as the county
seat within just a few years of the railroad's arrival. Helena was once a thriving town at the
intersection of two major cattle drive routes. To cater to all its visitors it had many hotels
and other businesses. Because of the influx of relatively well paid cowboys needing to let off
a little steam and get relief from the rigors of their dusty labor, Helena had a fearsome
reputation for lawlessness of all kinds, including gun fights and murder. The legend says that
a nearby landowner's son was killed in one of the frequent gun fights that had made the city so
notorious and the father swore to get his revenge by "killing the town that killed his son."
This he did by offering right of and cash, a bonus in railroad terms, to the perennially
financially troubled railroad. And now all that remains of Helena is the lonely old court
house, later used as a school, the metal bars of the once very popular jail and the remains of
an abandoned Masonic Lodge.
The first public train north, to Boerne, was on 3/12/87. Soon a weekend tourist train service there was begun. By
this time the "SAP" was running three passenger and six freight trains a day in and out of
San Antonio. Houston was reached in 1888, via Yoakum, a town created by the railroad. The
marshalling yards and repair facilities in Yoakum became the heart of the system, with lines
running north, west and east from there. The railroad even reached to Kerrville, to the north
west of San Antonio, much to the chagrin of Fredericksburg, who had been promised a rail
connection. They would have to wait until 1913, but that's a different story, worthy of an
entire chapter by itself. This will be added due course.
For more information about the history of rail service to Boerne, click
•BOERNE•
For information about the history of rail service to Waring and Welfare, click
•WARING•
For information about the history of rail service to Comfort, click
•COMFORT•
For information about the history of rail service to Center Point, click
•CENTER POINT•
For information about the history of rail service to Kerrville, click
•KERRVILLE•
For images taken from the very last train to Kerrville in 1971, click
•Last train to Kerrville•
Regrettably, the Achilles heel of the SA & AP was it's track work. Rails were often laid
directly onto the ground, with little or no ballast. This, coupled with the
fact the railroad mainly used light weight rail, usually 50 pound, was a recipe for disaster. Heat would warp the
rails, rot would set in to the ties, and any rain would undermine the line, as there was no
proper drainage. Furthermore, most of the company's bridges and trestles were wooden, which did
not make for very durable structures during river flooding. In those unregulated days, when the
necessity to get the rail line laid quickly and cheaply was paramount, so revenue could begin
to flow in order to pay for construction, there were many accidents. Add to this dangerous
situation a high volume of traffic on single tracks, insufficient sidings for passing trains and
primitive system signals and track access controls, and the results were obvious. Within a short
time there were any number of derailments and collisions.
On 1/2/1890 there was a disastrous wreck, when a wooden bridge over the La Vaca river at
Hallettsville collapsed as a freight train, pulled by #56, was attempting to cross it. The loss of life and the entire
train and all its contents, which included alcohol, to the delight of the crowd that came to see
the accident, led to many lawsuits. These included some for having built a wooden bridge over a
river very well known to flood. The already financially strained company had to go into to
receivership on 7/14/1890.
The S.A. & A.P. went into receivership in July, 1890. Here are some numbers from the financial
report filed with the receiver:
Earnings reported
Passenger.............................16,322.95
Mail.......................................1,366.34
Express.....................................820.00
Freight..................................29,737.69
Miscellaneous............................457.97
Total.....................................48,704.95
Expenses
Maint. of way........................11,535.72
Maint. of Equip.......................6,828.27
Conducting Transportation......24,099.13*
Miscellaneous..........................7,571.91
Total.....................................50,035.03
* Conducting Transportation includes fuel, water, train crew wages, repairs and injuries.
At this time the railroad had 688 miles of track and 50 locomotives The line was re-organized
under new management but, noticeably, without Uriah Lott. The Southern Pacific
bought the controlling interest in the company from Mifflin Kenedy but did not exercise direct control. Instead it
installed people in key positions to run it. The S.P., for all intents and purposes, gained
full control of the "SAP" and its lucrative services to Corpus Christi and into the Rio
Grande valley, as a connecting line to the Tex-Mex railroad had been built. The SP was sued by
the Texas Railroad Commission, as Texas law forbade the ownership and control of
parallel and competing lines, which was certainly the case with the route to Houston, and it was forced to
divest itself of its stock in the SA & AP. However, they sold it to "friendly" third parties and
still exerted effective control until they were finally allowed to buy the company outright,
which they did in 1925, when the SA & AP was leased to the Texas & New Orleans Railroad, the
S.P.'s subsidiary in Texas.
The SP's control may not have been a bad thing, all things considered. By 1916 the SA & AP had
86 locomotives and was earning $1,228,000 a year from passenger service and $2,851,000 from
freight. Many a small town was created by the railroad, either directly or indirectly, and once
small towns such as Kerrville and Kenedy, named for the railroad's early financial "savior,"
grew nicely into much larger communities. The system's peak year for mileage was 1927 when it
had 859 miles of lines.
For a detailed look at 1920 SA & AP statistics, click •1920•
The SA & AP line to Corpus Christi was down graded to secondary status in 1925 almost immediately
after the Southern Pacific was finally allowed to legally control and purchase the railroad. The line
through nearby Pleasanton, originally built by the San Antonio Uvalde & Gulf Railroad became
the primary line. The SAU & G, affectionately known as the "Sausage," had itself become part of
the Missouri Pacific's system, as part of a grouping of former independent lines called the "Gulf
Coast Lines." The SP found it to be more advantageous to lease use on the more direct MOPAC line than to
upgrade the older, twistier, SA & AP line. It was also a tacit acknowledgement that Corpus Christi
was a Missouri Pacific territory.
The line to Corpus Christi served an almost forgotten purpose during World War II. An "Alien Detention Center," or
prisoner of war camp was built near the tracks at Kenedy. An article in the Geneva convention states
that prisoners of war must be held at the same latitude at which they were captured. As the North
African campaign progressed many such prisoners were taken and the USA was obligated to keep them
at or near the same distance from the equator. Central Texas fitted the bill and the railroad
delivered the prisoners and the supplies to keep the camps going.
Two more SA & AP adverts
Much of the SA & AP is completely gone now. The tracks north through Boerne were removed after 1971,
when the Southern Pacific ended rail service beyond the rock quarry just south of Camp Bullis. The
line through Floresville was torn out as late as 1998. Local freight service had ended some five
years earlier. Now just about the only section of the old "SAP" remaining is what is now called the
"DALSA Sub" by the Union Pacific. DALSA is an abbreviation of Dallas / San Antonio. The DALSA "sub" section
is a connection between two main lines, allowing trains to move from one to the other.
The site of the old depot today
The "SAP" depot in San Antonio had already ceased to function as such before WW I, during which time
the ground floor was used as an officer's club, although some railroad offices were maintained on
the upper floor. The building was sold in 1925, but not before the depot got to feature in
a movie about Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders. It stood for another fourteen years and was
occupied by a variety of interests including a furniture company for over ten years. A wooden
frame building, its life span of over 50 years of service came to an end a little after the
SA & AP was fully merged into the T & NO in 1934 and completely lost its original identity.
The depot was torn down in 1939. Even the street was renamed from Aransas to South Alamo.
Souvenir hunters were invited to help themselves. San Antonio's
premier funeral director, Porter Loring, whose first job had been a ticket agent at the depot,
bought the window frame he had once worked behind. The depot's benches ended up and are still at
the Little Rhein Steak House on Alamo Street, on the Riverwalk.
For details about a trip made by some chapter members from San Antonio to Corpus Christi following the S.A.& A.P. and
returning via the S.A.U. & G., Click
•The 'SAP' and the 'SAUSAGE•
More Information on the S.A. & A.P.
BOOKS
The San Antonio And Aransas Pass Railway, by John Hedge & Geoffrey Dawson. AMA Graphics, 1983
Uriah Lott: Dauntless Pioneer and Man of Vision, by J.L. Allhands. (This book is long out of print. If
you can get your hands on a copy you have just found yourself a real treasure!)
WEB SITES
Texas Handbook Online
The Texas handbook Online article is very informative
SA & AP Railway - The Mission Route
A wonderful site with a lot more information, and delightful pictures.
To go to the home page of the Texas Transportation Museum's web site, click T.T.M.
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