Texas Central Railroad

The Texas Central lived through several corporate lives. The Handbook says it was chartered on May 30, 1879 as a feeder to the Houston and Texas Central, entered receivership in 1885 and was sold at foreclosure in 1891. A new company took the property in 1893. It built the De Leon to Cross Plains branch in 1910 and 1911, abandoned in 1944. After the Katy's last train reached Waco on November 29, 1967, a new Texas Central operated the twenty-five miles between Dublin and Gorman the next day. Early nicknames included the Tin Can and the Lone Star Line.

What the plaque says

Texas Central Railroad Railroad construction in Texas, interrupted by the Civil War and by the national economic depression of the early 1870s, began a period of recovery in the late 1870s and early 1880s. Chartered on May 31, 1879, the Texas Central Railway was owned by the Houston & Texas Central Railway and was in competition with the Texas Pacific to build a line westward through North Central Texas. Extending from Ross Station near Waco in 1879, the Texas Central reached the Erath-Comanche County line in 1880. The Texas Central laid out the town of De Leon on April 10, 1881, and railroad official Robert M. Elgin conducted the sale of town lots from the back of a flatcar on July 7. Although the initial sale of lots was slow, the town soon developed and attracted new settlers from the Southeastern United States. Railroad offices, shops, and a roundhouse were built here, and De Leon became the area's primary shipping point for cotton and, later, peanuts and other products. Acquired by the Missouri-Kansas-Texas (Katy) Railroad in 1910, the line continued to operate until 1967, when local backers purchased part of the line and continued to provide shipping service to customers along "The Peanut Line" connecting Dublin, De Leon, and Gorman. (1994)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Dublin Bottling Works — 12 mi
  The Erath County plant that bottled Dr Pepper with cane sugar from 1891 until a 2012 settlement ended its Dr Pepper license, and that still makes its own sodas the same way.
• Old Rip at the Eastland County Courthouse — 26 mi
  A horned lizard in a glass-topped casket in the 1928 Eastland courthouse, the creature said to have come out alive from the old building's cornerstone after thirty-one years.
• Conrad Hilton Center and Mobley Hotel — 32 mi
  The 40-room oil-boom hotel in Cisco that Conrad Hilton bought in 1919 when a bank deal fell through, now a museum of the Hilton start and of Cisco's 1927 Santa Claus bank robbery.

More markers nearby

• De Leon Peanut Company — steps away
• Laura Valenta — steps away
• Cyrus Campbell — 0.5 mi
• Community of Comyn-Theney — 4.5 mi