Terminal Railroad

The plaque gives both lines in outline; the Handbook of Texas has the working detail. The 1892 charter planned ten miles across Harbor Island and Turtle Cove to Mustang Island, with $250,000 in capital and a Baltimore syndicate under Alexander Brown and Company behind it. Contractors D. M. Picton and J. P. Nelson ran the first line three and a half miles over man-made islands and trestles, and later rolled whole rock cars onto railed barges for the jetties. That old line was abandoned in 1917. In 1916 the newer road earned $320 from passengers and $58,000 from freight.

What the plaque says

Terminal Railroad Built in 1892, the Aransas Harbor Terminal Railroad ("Old Terminal Railroad") provided a means for transporting rock from mainland quarries to jetties under construction in the pass. In 1909 the Aransas Pass Channel and Dock Company was chartered to build a channel from the first south Texas deep water port at Harbor Island to Aransas Pass. As the channel was dredged, the displaced sediment was piled along one side and became the basis for a railroad bed. Opened in 1912, the new terminal railroad extended along the roadbed and a series of eight trestles. It connected with the San Antonio and Aransas Pass railroad in Aransas Pass, and was an important cotton shipping tool. Passenger service was inaugurated with the "Toonerville Trolley", passenger coaches pulled by a converted model T Ford truck, which transported workers from the mainland to a new shipyard on Harbor Island during World War I. After Corpus Christi was designated a deep water port in 1922, business declined for Harbor Island and the railroad. In 1931 the rail line was converted to a road for automobiles, which was in turn replaced by a new highway in 1960. Hurricanes in 1961 and 1970 left few visible remnants of the terminal railroad. (1989)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Port Aransas — 6.2 mi
  The fishing town at the north end of Mustang Island, reached by a free state ferry that crosses the ship channel day and night, with a university marine lab begun in a one-room shack.
• Fulton Mansion State Historic Site — 13 mi
  A French Second Empire house of 1874-77 on Aransas Bay, paid for with hides and tallow, with gas lights, central heat and hot running water no other house nearby had.
• Mustang Island State Park — 16 mi
  More than five miles of Gulf beach on a barrier island named for wild horses, with beach camping on the sand and a twenty-mile paddling trail on the bay side.
• USS Lexington Museum on the Bay — 16 mi
  An Essex-class carrier of 1943 moored off North Beach, the Blue Ghost that Tokyo Rose kept reporting sunk, and the Navy's training carrier for nearly three decades after.

More markers nearby

• Great Land Lottery of Aransas Pass — 0.7 mi
• John Wiebel VFW Post 2932 — 0.7 mi
• First United Methodist Church of Aransas Pass — 0.9 mi
• Late Pleistocene Ingleside Fauna — 3.9 mi