Sunday, September 25, 2016
Texas & New Orleans Depot In Frankston, TX ...
This is the best vintage photo of this depot Dudley has ever seen. Guessing it was taken in the 40's. You can see a 4 Wheel Cart used for loading snd unloading Boxcars. The Semaphore Signal and Pole is visable beside the depot. You can see the loading dock and ramp and the ticket window where the Station Agent could transact business. He would have had a desk in there with a Telegraph Key to send and receive messages up and down the line. It looks like a claw foot bathtub on the end of the loading dock. Wonder what the story was on that? The building in the background across the highway is the Tomato Packing/Loading Shed. Dudley wishes he had a dollar for every bushel basket of green tomatoes that moved through there back in the day. The last Passenger train run was in 1964. The Southern Pacific Freight Trains ran a while longer. Dudley started College in the Fall of 1977. Dudley would drive through Frankston on his way to Nacogdoches. Pretty sure there was an ocassional freight train on the line at that time. Dudley started dating his wife in 1980, Dudley started making trips on the weekends to Frankston to visit her parents and go to the Farm. By that time Dudley is pretty sure the line had been abandoned. About ten years after that, the rails and ties were all pulled up and sold for salvage. The City of Frankston cared enough to restore and preserve the depot for future generations. It is the Library.
This is the Texas & New Orleans Depot in Beaumont, TX. Sometime in the 1940's when Dudleys future father in law was a young single man, he saved up some money. He went to the Frankston Depot and bought a round trip ticket to Beaumont, TX. He rode on an old heavyweight passenger car pulled by a steam locomotive. He wanted to see the world outside a small sleepy East TX town. Dudley wishes he could have gone along on the trip. Would have gone through Jacksonville, down to Nacogdoches and down to Beaumont through some of the most beautiful Piney Woods you have ever seen. It would have been an adventure!
This is the 1952 time table for the Dallas to Beaumont, TX run. There were a lot of small jerk water towns along the way!
T&NO Depot in Nacogdoches, TX.
T&NO Depot in Huntington, TX.
T&NO Depot in Woodville, TX.
Subscribe to Posts [Atom]
