2 Galveston,TX ghost stories...

REVIVING TEXAS' OLDEST RAILROAD: PROPONENTS SAY A HOUSTON-GALVESTON COULD ROLL AGAIN IN 5 YEARS, BYPASSING TRAFFIC CONCERNS

Photo here: [images.chron.com]

Caption reads: John Riordan, 8, of New Jersey, visits the railroad museum in Galveston, where the city is working on a blueprint for passenger service to Houston. Passengers from Houston would disembark at the museum, where they could catch a bus or trolley. (Carlos Javier Sanchez/Chronicle)

GALVESTON, TX -- A passenger train between Houston and Galveston, could begin rolling along the oldest rail line in Texas in as little as five years, according to members of a study group trying to make it happen.

The group is working on a blueprint for the city of Galveston, which it expects to complete in June, that will specify the costs and construction needs for reviving passenger service that ceased in 1967.

The passenger line is needed to ease steadily worsening traffic congestion on the Gulf Freeway and reduce automobile pollution that is contributing to the Houston area's failure to meet federal clean-air standards, proponents say.

The commuter rail line would cost far less than light rail or expanding the freeway, allow an increase in rail-freight service and offer an efficient evacuation route from Galveston when hurricanes threaten, they say.

"It has all the elements that would make it eminently possible," said study-group member John Bertini, chairman of the Galveston Railroad Museum board.

Galveston Mayor Lyda Ann Thomas says City Council support for passenger rail is
unwavering. "Trains could play a key part in an evacuation," Thomas said.

The line also is supported in principle by U.S. Rep. Ron Paul (a Republican whose district includes Galveston), Galveston County Judge Jim Yarbrough and Harris County Judge Robert Eckels.

Everything depends on the plan being devised by the study group.

"The challenge for all this is how to fund it and the operating subsidy," Eckels said. "I'm anxious to see the results."

The blueprint is "essentially a cookbook that will take and show what the operation should look like and what it will take to get there in terms of construction and operating," Bertini said.

The group of consultants, engineers and planners envisions a train running from an as-yet-undecided station in Houston at 59 mph along the 140-year-old Galveston, Houston & Henderson Railroad, said consultant Barry Goodman, Goodman Corp. president.

The passenger line would make four to six stops before arriving at the Galveston Railroad Museum, housed in the former Galveston passenger terminal. Debarking passengers would exit through the museum to board a trolley, electric bus, horse-drawn carriage or cruise ship shuttle.

Goodman, whose company is leading the study, said Galveston plans to build a transportation hub next to the railroad museum to allow connections with buses and taxis.

Proposed stages

The passenger line might be built in two stages, the first running from League City to Galveston and later extending to Houston, Bertini said.

"For the leadership of the region to ignore the possibility to rebuild a rail corridor that has been there 100 years, that can be done at a fraction of the cost of building highway capacity and would reduce pollution ... it would be irresponsible for that opportunity to be ignored," Goodman said.

The Houston-Galveston corridor is better suited for passenger rail than other routes because it has heavy traffic in both directions morning and evening, Bertini said. Other routes have heavy traffic in one direction in the morning and the opposite direction in the evening, he said.
Unlike other traffic corridors, the Houston-Galveston route is heavily traveled on weekends as well because Galveston is a prime tourist destination for Houstonians, he said.

Consultant Rick Beverlin, a Goodman associate, said the only effort he was aware of to calculate the number of commuters in the corridor was a 2003 study on park-and-ride use by commuters living in League City and Clear Lake who worked in Galveston. That study showed about 10,000 commuters, he said.

The final study will include an estimate of commuters and potential rail ridership, Beverlin said.

"We're not at a point where we have any real cost estimates, but I think the money to pay for this will be a combination of funding sources," Goodman said. Sources could include federal money and debt financing, or taxes from a regional mobility authority or a railroad district, according to Beverlin.

Union Pacific Railroad, which operates the line from Houston to the Galveston Island bridge, is waiting to see whether the study group can devise a plan that won't interfere with its freight operations, said Joe Adams, special assistant to the UP chairman. "The project would be feasible, but it would take a very significant investment in rail capacity," Adams said.

Coordinating service

The most difficult challenge will be to coordinate the passenger service with freight service at the north end of the route and at the railroad bridge to Galveston Island, he said.

Only six to eight freight trains ply most of the freight line, making coordination easy, Beverlin said. But 40 or more freight trains a day use a 3- to 4-mile-long segment at the north end of the route, he said.

Adams said the bridge to Galveston Island, which opens a span for barge traffic, could be a choke point because barge traffic has the right of way. Beverlin and Bertini said trains would have the right of way if a scheduled train route were in place.

The study group is working on several solutions to those problems, including the construction of a separate track for passenger trains on some parts of the route or sidings near the bridge that would allow trains to wait, Beverlin said.

Adams said the railroad is cooperating with the study but will not support the plan if it hinders freight operations.

Bertini said keeping Union Pacific happy is an important part of the plan. "It's their railroad, and we've got to be sensitive to that and we've got to bring benefits to them," he said.

Upgraded freight line

Goodman proposes to offer Union Pacific upgraded track in return for use of its right of way, allowing it to increase the speed of its freight trains. Freight trains run at 25 mph to 30 mph now because it's more economical for the railroad to lower speeds than to upgrade the track, he said.

The upgraded rail would allow Union Pacific to carry more freight from the increasingly busy ports at Houston, Galveston and Texas City, Goodman said.

Officials in Galveston and Harris counties have been discussing a passenger railroad for several years, but the bump in gas prices has intensified interest, Goodman said.

The service ended in 1967 because more people were using cars and fewer were using rail. The Texas Limited, housed at the Amtrak station at 903 Washington, a privately owned enterprise that offered weekend rail trips between Houston and Galveston, ran on weekends from 1989 to 1994.

The passenger-rail study is an extension of several federally funded demonstration passenger runs done in cooperation with Amtrak on weekends in 2002 and 2003. The demonstration attracted enough riders to be deemed a success and led the Galveston City Council to finance the $350,000 study last year with a federal grant.

"I can't see how we wouldn't have the political will to move forward," Yarbrough said. "If we can agree on the concepts, good. People can wrestle down each issue."

Bertini said the study group will meet with representatives from all of the cities, counties and political subdivisions along the proposed route.

"There also will be one for the public, so we build in their input for the plan," he said. – Harvey Rice, The Houston Chronicle
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BIG CROWDS, BUT NO PHOTOGRAPHS CELEBRATED RAILROAD'S ARRIVAL

Please inform whether photographs exist of the historic events when the Thomas W. Pierce railroad (Galveston, Harrisburg & San Antonio Railway) reached San Antonio, about Feb. 5, 1877.
The grand celebration lasted two days, Feb. 23-24, 1877, and was covered by the local newspapers. Were any photographs taken of all the military and political dignitaries -- including the railroad officials such as the president, Thomas Wentworth Pierce, and chief engineer/surveyor, Maj. James Converse -- at the celebration? - Pedro Zuñiga

You are right that the arrival of the Galveston, Harrisburg & San Antonio, or GH&SA, Railway was a big deal, observed by some big wheels. The occasion was "a turning point for San Antonio, the last major city in the United States to gain a rail line," writes Hugh Hemphill in "The Railroads of San Antonio and South Central Texas."

A crowd of about 8,000 people turned out for the arrival of the first train, Feb. 19, 1877, and the event was covered at length in the next day's issue of the San Antonio Express -- without photos, since this was more than two decades before most papers began to use them.

The railroad's president, Thomas Wentworth Peirce (note the unusual spelling), acted as fireman for the run into the city, says Hemphill, later taking "everyone of importance" on short trips in his private car.

Later, John Hermann Kampmann -- a successful local builder who also served as mayor -- escorted railroad officials and Texas Gov. Richard Hubbard to the celebration in Alamo Plaza, in a procession heralded by marching bands. The mayors of Austin and Galveston were on hand, along with "huge numbers of people from Houston, Galveston and towns along the railroad route," says Docia Schultz Williams in "The History and Mystery of the Menger Hotel."

The evening celebration in Alamo Plaza was lit by "flaring torches" and Chinese lanterns in the street, as well as on the bunting-draped Menger Hotel, built and later owned by Kampmann.

If anyone took pictures of the daytime proceedings, Hemphill hasn't seen them, nor are they in the collection of more than 3 million Texas historical photos at the Institute of Texan Cultures, or ITC, library.

"I cannot recall any early image of a train arriving," says Hemphill, manager and historian of the Texas Transportation Museum. "There are none of the arrival of the GH&SA in 1877, the International & Great Northern in 1881 or any of the subsequent 'first' trains." With exposure times of several minutes, he says, "Capturing a steam locomotive was beyond the camera technology (even) of the 1880s and 1890s."

However, it would have been possible to have photographed less-dynamic aspects of the 1877 festivities. Five commercial photography studios are listed in the San Antonio city directory for 1877-1878, says Tom Shelton, ITC photo curator. During that period, he says, local photographer Henry A. Doerr, visiting lensman Alexis V. Latourette and others "produced numerous views of the city in the 1870s that were sold in stores for viewing with the common parlor stereoscopes." These were photos of hotels, commercial buildings, churches, plazas and other landmarks.

Professional photographers "could have documented the arrival of the first train," says Shelton. "Photographing a crowd watching a train coming to a halt would have been comparable to taking a picture of a market scene."

He also notes that photos were taken of the construction of the Union Pacific Railroad and published in an 1868 book and that there were pictures taken the following year at the joining of that railroad and the Central Pacific.

"Was the arrival of the first train in a community too commonplace by 1877?" Shelton speculates.

Given that the first train in San Antonio was about the last such event in a large city, maybe commercial photographers and the shopkeepers who sold their work deemed the occasion of little interest to a stereoscope-viewing public for whom railroad travel was no longer a novelty.

Now researching San Antonio's roads for a forthcoming book about the next phase of transportation, Hemphill is looking for photos of early bicyclists here during the "original bicycle craze from 1895-1905." To share stories or images of family members who were two-wheel pioneers, contact him at Hugh@satx.rr.com. - Paula Allen, The San Antonio Express-News