Texas railroad history: First train in Dallas was 150 years ago

DALLAS — On July 16, 1872, one thing arrived in Dallas that, with out it, would have left Dallas a shell of town it’s as we speak. Or possibly not even a metropolis in any respect.

The first train rolled into city.

The locomotive chugged alongside the freshly-built tracks of the Houston and Texas Central Railway, which reduce by what’s now downtown Dallas.

The train arrival marked a serious progress interval for Dallas; town’s inhabitants tripled over the course of a decade, from a small frontier buying and selling submit to a bustling market of commerce.

“This single event set Dallas on a growth trajectory like no other city in North Texas,” in line with the Museum of the American Railroad.

But the expansion introduced on by the railroad truly began 14 years earlier, on the Texas coast in Galveston, in line with a number of articles by the Texas State Historical Association

Here’s how the TSHA recounted the arrival of the railroad in Dallas:

In 1848, Ebenezer Allen, a state official, obtained a constitution to construct a railway. After a number of years on maintain, the Galveston and Red River Railway firm broke floor in Houston in 1853, laying 25 miles of observe to Cypress City.

The firm was renamed to Houston and Texas Central in 1856 and prolonged the road to 81 miles to Millican, a small city between Houston and College Station. Then the Civil War put the railroad on pause.

Construction on the Houston and Texas Central did not decide again up till 1867, and the corporate continued its stretch northward, reaching Corsicana in 1871.

At this level, Dallas was a younger and rising metropolis, however one missing a spark for main enlargement.

John Neely Bryan had based town as a frontier buying and selling submit. But Dallas lacked a serious artery of transportation; the Trinity River wasn’t sensible as a delivery waterway.

So Dallas officers tried to get a railroad, and so they succeeded with the enlargement of the Houston and Texas Central.

The railway expanded up from Corsicana to Dallas in 1872 and finally met with the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railway from the north, connecting Texas to the nation’s rail system.

While Dallas acquired its first railway in 1872, a just-as-notable arrival occurred the following yr, when the Texas and Pacific railway related to Dallas and intersected the Texas and Houston Central. This gave Dallas a uncommon, on the time, railway crossroads, heading east-west and north-south.

Dallas’ inhabitants started to growth, rising from round 3,000 in 1870 to 10,000 by 1880.

“As rail lines expanded, this story would play out in countless cities and towns across North Texas,” the railroad museum stated. “But Dallas would experience the most growth and have the greatest impact as a crossroads of commerce and culture in the region.”