The Texas Transportation Museum in San Antonio is mostly about trains. We visited between shuttling Mark between baseball venues. One of those trips involved a pleasant conversation with a police officer. (Pleasant because I got off with a warning.) A train ride is included with the price of admission, but the train only travels 1/3 of a mile. They’ve been donated an additional two miles of track, but the volunteers have not had the chance to lay it yet.
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- Our train.
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- Every model train gauge was represented except Z and the even smaller TT.
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- Where have all the cabooses gone? To museums.
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- Here’s why the cabooses retired: self-lubricating bearings.
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- Standard gauge rails are 4ft 8-1/2 inches apart because Roman chariots’ wheels were!
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- The loop was used by a telegrapher to pass messages to a moving train. The engineer would put his hand through the loop to get the message, then drop the loop which the telegrapher would have to walk down the tracks to retrieve. The fork was better – it dod not leave the telegrapher’s hand.
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- Kay boards the Pullman car.
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- Luxurious sleeping quarters in the Pullman car..
There were more trains in Georgia, Trains, Trains, and More Trains, but this stop provided some interesting tidbits.
The sign for Standard Railroad Gauge contains a metric equivalent in parentheses (1.44 mm) that seems out of place. Perhaps it should read 1.44 metres instead. (This coming from a forced metric convert.)
Good catch, Dean. 1.44mm is 0.05669291 inches.