Vintage train rides offer a window into Texas’ locomotive history and a family’s legacy on the tracks
By Dina Gachman
The Ties that Bind
Photographs by Tom McCarthy Jr.
As I step up into the 55-passenger McKeever train, volunteer David Cenova offers some advice: “Don’t let the mannequins startle you.”
It’s a tip I come to deeply appreciate about six seconds into our tour, when I peek into the first section of the 83-foot McKeever and encounter a mannequin outfitted with a long blonde wig, a blue-and-white polka-dot dress, blood red lipstick, and a painted-on expression that seems on the verge of panic. Despite Cenova’s warning, the mannequin puts me in a similar state of unease.
Long before mannequins populated the train, the McKeever, built by the Pullman Company, started traveling between San Antonio and New York in 1924. It’s one of many restored train cars, tractors, buses, and model trains on display at the Texas Transportation Museum in north San Antonio, including a 1911 out-of-commission steam locomotive that’s undergoing repairs.
“People don’t understand how we used to travel,” says Cenova, who previously served as president of the sprawling 40-acre museum. The train is cramped by today’s standards, but space-saving innovations like small pull-down bathroom sinks and a micro-kitchen are impressive. “Think of this as a Winnebago on steroids,” Cenova says as we exit the train, which isn’t in service but acts as a kind of living history museum for train enthusiasts, curious travelers, and school groups. The mannequins, as unsettling as I find them, are a time travel mechanism. I can imagine the blond woman with the red lipstick going from San Antonio to St. Louis to join a vaudeville act. It’s been over a century since trains were the preferred method of travel across Texas, but there are people and places across the state devoted to sharing their passion for trains and helping generation Cybertruck understand and appreciate the beauty of rail travel.
Enjoying this article?I’m not at the Texas Transportation Museum as a railfan or ferroequinologist (aka someone who, like Cenova, reveres trains). I like trains, and I’ve had a romantic view of them ever since I watched Richard Linklater’s seminal 1995 film Before Sunrise, which takes us into a train car where Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy) meet cute and bond over the books they’re reading. I even set off on a three-month solo European train adventure of my own in my early 20s, which was no doubt partly a manifestation of my desire to meet a literature-loving Jesse/Ethan of my own.
Those overnight train trips, with the sound of the wheels barreling along the tracks, were, for me, a novel way to see the world. I bonded with strangers, gazed out the window at rolling hills and town squares, and let my mind meander. The experience was formative, but it’s not what led me to San Antonio to look at old trains. What sparked my interest was the idea that riding the rails and learning more about the state’s history of train travel might be a way to connect to my grandfather. Pampaw died in 1988 when I was still in middle school, but maybe after all these decades, I can bond with the memory of a man who embodied that Texas tradition for over four decades.
In his 1942 essay collection One Man’s Meat, E.B. White wrote, “Railroad trains are such magnificent objects we commonly mistake them for Destiny.” I’m not sure if my grandfather wo uld have agreed, since, for him, the train wasn’t about romance or adventure. It was about paying the bills.
Born Robert Darwin Horton in Brownwood in 1925, Pampaw’s first job was working as a call boy in Fort Worth’s Davidson Yard for what was then called the Texas and Pacific Railway. At 14 years old, he was tasked with getting up in the wee hours and riding his bike around to wake the railroad crews. They didn’t have iPhones and digital clocks, so my grandfather got the workday going through sheer persistence. A few years later he joined the Coast Guard and set sail during World War II. When the conflict ended, he came home and got a job at the railroad as a clerk. Family legend has it that he spotted my grandmother working behind the counter at a Fort Worth drugstore and immediately told a buddy, “I’m going to marry that girl.” His bold prophecy came to fruition in 1946, and they had my Uncle Scott and, two years later, my mom. With a young family to support, Pampaw worked hard and was eventually promoted to yardmaster, coordinating all activities in the train yard.
For 42 years he labored there, retiring at the age of 56. After he died in 1988, I inherited his Coast Guard uniform, an old leather wallet with a $3.60 San Francisco theater ticket inside, and an 8×10 photo of him sitting up in a tower at “The Bowl,” the part of Davidson Yard where they’d break down trains. In the picture, his hair is sleek and silver, his skin deeply tanned. By then, Texas and Pacific was called the Union Pacific Railroad. My grandfather looks official situated in his perch above the train track but also uncharacteristically serious. This was a guy who whistled everywhere he went, never met a stranger, and taught me silly knock-knock jokes that I’ve passed on to my son (Dwayne! Dwayne who!? Dwayne the bathtub I’m dwowning!). I’m guessing Pampaw likely looked so steely in the photo because he wasn’t riding the rails for kicks, nor meeting beautiful French women. As yardmaster, he was responsible for Tower 55, one of the busiest junctions in the U.S., coordinating as many as 100 freight and passenger trains per day barreling between the West Coast, Midwest, Gulf Coast, Mexico, and Canada.
The original wooden tower, which was constructed to help control traffic flow, began service in 1904. It was replaced by a sturdier three-story brick structure in the 1930s. During my grandfather’s time, from the 1950s to the late ’80s, hundreds of trains converged in the yard each day, carrying manufactured goods, agricultural products, coal, and more. His job managing all of that rail traffic was serious work, as he was responsible for controlling levers and switches, slowing the flow of traffic, or stopping trains to prevent collisions. “It wasn’t the easiest job,” says Bob Hestes, who served as manager of operating practices at the railroad and was a former colleague of Pampaw and my Uncle Scott. “Your grandfather was a true gentleman,” Hestes says. “When I found out he was yardmaster, I knew things would be done right.”
In the 1990s, the Tower 55 job became automated, and in 2020, the structure was demolished despite protests from historians and railroad aficionados.
My uncle has added to that oral history over the years, and because he also spent his career at the yard, I’ve long thought of my mom’s side of the family as train people. Uncle Scott got a job laying track at the railroad the day he graduated high school in 1967. Like Pampaw, my uncle worked his way up, even though the toil of laying track made him want to quit on day one. Yet Scott, like his father, stayed on for 42 years—until he retired in 2009.
When I ask Longview resident Griff Hubbard, a 54-year railroad vet and host of the podcast I’ve Seen Some Trains Before, if an affinity for trains can be passed down like so much genetic material, he corroborates my theory: “There’s some truth to the idea that the railroad gets in your blood.” Unlike Hubbard, I didn’t become a fifth-generation railroad worker, but I still feel a connection. As a child in Fort Worth, the sound of the Union Pacific lulled me to sleep in my bedroom on Bilglade Road. All these years later, I can hear the Union Pacific whistling in the distance near US 79 in Hutto, where I now reside. It’s the same sound my grandfather heard hundreds of times each day. My 7-year-old son, Cole, is serenaded by that same trilling when he’s playing by the creek behind our house. We might not rely on those train tracks to get around the state anymore, but their existence is a constant reminder of the past, of a time when rail travel connected cities like Wichita Falls and Big Spring to the wider world.
“Every town in Texas of any significance was created because of a railroad or bolstered by the railroad,” says Hugh Hemphill, who manages the Texas Transportation Museum in San Antonio. The Buffalo Bayou, Brazos and Colorado Railway Company was chartered in 1850, and in 1853 the 20-mile stretch running from what’s now Houston to Stafford became the first railroad to operate in the state. By 1879 there were 2,440 miles of railroad that connected Texas to the national rail grid. Over the next five decades, that number had jumped to 17,078 miles. The Texas and Pacific was granted the right to lay track from Marshall all the way to San Diego. Once San Antonio got rail service in 1877—the last major U.S. city to receive that honor—Hemphill says “the fortunes of the city did a 180. The population soared.”
Hemphill wasn’t always a train enthusiast, but when he started working with the museum and became immersed in its history, he was hooked. “It turns out I’m crazy about trains,” he says. He’s visited historical depots around the state and marvels at the architecture and at the fact that “these little buildings in the middle of a town” could cause populations to explode and cities to expand. Like most train lovers, he’s taken trips around Texas, calling Amtrak rides “a hoot.” He recently rode a train through Central Texas via the Austin Steam Train Association and says the best way to see Austin is from the window of a train. “It’s an entirely different experience,” Hemphill says. “We’ve all suffered on Interstate 35 in traffic jams, but on a train it’s a new point of view.”
Since mass-produced automobiles and the rise of aviation have lured travelers away from the rails, many of the old, once bustling train depots have closed. Yet there are still some options like the Sunset Limited, a long-distance Amtrak line that traverses the state and stretches from New Orleans to Los Angeles. If time is a factor, there are also a few short-distance rides that provide good old-fashioned nostaglia. For example, the Grapevine Vintage Railroad in northeast Texas offers rides in restored 1920s-era coaches pulled by vintage locomotives. Since the longest train ride my son, Cole, has been on is a four-minute kiddie excursion at the Hutto Christmas Fair, I bring him along for the Grapevine Bear Creek Short Line, which leaves from the Cotton Belt Depot on Main Street. Like San Antonio, Grapevine’s population exploded once the train came through town, leaping from 681 in 1910 to over 1,800 by 1950.
That legacy continues in a different capacity today, as vintage train rides have become a major tourist attraction in the town of just over 50,000 residents. The depot dates to 1888, and the restored yellow structure has retained its original wood floors, plus historical details like old telegram papers and a train car menu that offers a full meal of mutton or baked shad in white sauce. Posters outside tell the fictional story of train robbers Nat Barrett and Willy Majors, who, in 1890, each aimed to steal $60,000 that was rumored to be on a train passing through town. Instead of nabbing the loot, as the tale goes, Nat and Willy challenged each other to a gunfight and missed their window for thieving. When I relay this story to Cole, he’s even more revved up for the ensuing ride. As we walk around the Grapevine depot, I explain his ancestors’ role directing all the trains. Whether that bit of family history will resonate as much as his grandfather’s knock-knock jokes, only time will tell.
With Cole, I’ve opted for the shorter excursion, since I have serious doubts that a 7-year-old will sit still for the four-hour Cotton Belt Route, which travels to the Fort Worth Stockyards. We meet train supervisor Ken Adams, who lets my son sit inside the cab and check out the switches and levers that control the ride. Over the intercom, the conductor yells, “All aboard!”—so we head to our seats. The train holds 420 people, but Adams tells us we’re at half-capacity today. Our coach is outfitted with antique red and-gold brocade seats, art deco stained-glass panels above the windows, and a slim luggage rack that makes today’s overhead airplane compartments seem gigantic by comparison. Before we take off, Adams reminds us, “You’re traveling with 100 years of history.”
The ride is quick, and we don’t pass any grand vistas, but it’s the perfect amount of time for a child to get a sense of what it may have been like to travel by rail in the 1940s, when Grapevine touted itself the “Cantaloupe Capital of the World,” and crops were shipped via rail to places like Kansas City. We don’t get any melon during our visit, but we do get a sandwich from Weinberger’s Deli down the road from the depot. That fringe benefit seems to overshadow any deep-rooted connection to our family’s legacy for the moment, as Cole digs into his first ever cheesesteak. “This is the best thing I’ve ever eaten in my whole life,” he gushes, his face smeared with onions and sauce.
Two weeks after my Grapevine excursion, I head to the Texas State Railroad, which is about 150 miles southest in Palestine. I arrive solo for this trek through the Piney Woods so I can focus more on today’s journey and less on complimentary cheesesteaks. It’s a four-hour trip from this East Texas town to Rusk and back. When I pull up to the station, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Dire Straits play from the outdoor speakers, which doesn’t exactly transport me back to 1881, when local prisoners laid the track. I talk to a few fellow travelers while we wait for the vintage train to depart. There’s a couple from Greenville, about 100 miles north, who are here to relive some of the longer train journeys they took in their youth. One man, from Mansfield, says he comes from a family of railroaders. This excursion has been on his bucket list for 20 years. Three widowed sisters wearing matching pink tank tops tell me they Google things to do and base their vacations on the results. They’ve hit up wineries, gone zip lining, and encountered alligators in Brazos Bend State Park. And now they’re here in Palestine to see what the Texas State Railroad is all about.
Joyce Jones, aka Miss Joyce, is an 81-year-old train attendant who has served as a tour guide for 14 years. “I love to meet people and show off the train,” she says. Jones can rattle off facts about the early days of the railroad and share stories about the time the debut episode of Taylor Sheridan’s 1883 was shot there, or the night in 2000 when stuntman Evel Knievel’s son jumped the entire train on his motorcycle. In 2019, country singer Miranda Lambert took a top-secret trip on the train during the winter Polar Express event, and all the employees were sworn to secrecy so she could enjoy the ride in peace. “One employee talked,” Jones says. “He was gone the next day.”
Jones gets ready for duty, and before we board, I meet a woman named Lina from Athens. Her dark hair is cut short, and she’s wearing a gold wedding band on a chain around her neck. She’s alone, and I ask what brings her to the tracks today. Maybe, like the couple from Greenville, she’s here for a ride harkening back to her youth. Maybe she wants to see the Piney Woods from the window of a 1920s train car. Lina pauses, her eyes searching the concrete below. Tears well up, and she whispers, “I’m here to honor my husband.”
When she explains that, like my grandfather and uncle, he was a 42-year vet of the railroad industry, I’m immediately struck by the similarities between our families. I tell Lina about my own circumstances—that I’m hoping to find some connection to my grandfather and piece together a part of his life I never really knew. When it’s time to board, Lina and I check our tickets and discover we’re in the same train car, in seats across the aisle from each other. Coincidentally, we’re both in car 42.
Once inside the pre-Depression-era art deco car, people grab popcorn and drinks, and Jones passes out tiny cups of sparkling wine and cider. We toast to whoever has anniversaries or birthdays, and to the trip ahead. I imagine Pampaw, sitting up in his tower, watching over the trains in Fort Worth. I won’t claim that the various rail trips have granted me some secret insight into my grandfather’s life, but I do feel his presence in Palestine. The train lurches forward, wheels squeal along the tracks. We settle in and gaze out the big picture windows at the tall pines, the bridges and creeks and meadows, all eager to see whatever it is we’re hoping to find.
