Texas Railroad History - Tower 154 - Angleton
A Crossing of the St. Louis, Brownsville & Mexico
Railway and
the Houston & Brazos Valley Railway
Above: John W. Barriger III
snapped this photo of the Missouri Pacific (MP) depot in Angleton from the rear
platform of his business car as his train proceeded south toward Brownsville on
the St. Louis, Brownsville & Mexico (SLB&M) Railway. Geographically, the view is
to the northeast with the Houston & Brazos Valley Railway crossing the SLB&M
adjacent to the depot.
By this date, probably mid-1930s, MP owned both railroads, hence they had
erected a "union depot" near the crossing. Since 1929, this crossing had been
controlled by Tower 154, a mechanical interlocking plant that, at least by time
of this photo, was housed inside the depot. Below:
This undated photo from the collection of Jim Williams shows the MP depot more
clearly with the H&BV tracks passing beside it. The white placards visible to train crews on both
lines announce that the Tower 154 interlocker is housed inside.
The town of Velasco was founded in 1831 along the banks
of the Brazos River, four miles from the Gulf of Mexico. It was an important
town in Texas history -- the site where the Treaty of Velasco was signed in
1836, and a temporary capital of the Republic of Texas. The town declined
substantially after the Civil War, but by the early 1890s, economic revival
brought new construction in an attempt to create a deep water port facility at
the mouth of the Brazos River. In 1891, the Velasco Terminal Railway (VTR) was
founded to serve the port with grand ideas to build a rail line from Velasco to
Hempstead. Two land promoters founded the town of Angleton sixteen miles northwest of Velasco and,
to attract the railroad,
offered an interest in their land in exchange for the railroad building through the
center of town. By the end of 1892, a 20-mile rail line had been completed from
Velasco through Angleton to Chenango Junction (later renamed Anchor) where a
connection was made with an existing line owned by the International & Great Northern (I-GN) Railroad.
The VTR attracted the attention of E. H. Cunningham who owned a large sugar
plantation at Sugar Land. Through the Port of
Galveston,
Cunningham was importing a large volume of sugar cane and low grade sugar
products from Cuba that were being shipped by rail to his sugar mills and refinery. Routing through the Port of
Velasco was an intriguing option because it was closer than
Galveston and was connected by rail to Anchor, only 32 miles from
Sugar Land. Cunningham knew the I-GN and VTR could provide the necessary rail
service from Velasco, but he was
also pondering the alternative of having his own rail line from House Junction (near the main sugar mill) to Anchor,
eliminating the I-GN haul. Cunningham's
successor, William Eldridge, proceeded to build such a line in 1916 as an
extension of his Sugar Land
Railway. By then, the VTR had folded and its initial reorganization had also
failed. It had finally been re-chartered as the Houston & Brazos Valley (H&BV)
Railway in 1907. Eldridge toyed with building four miles past Anchor into
Angleton but did not do so.
Having reached Anchor, the reason Eldridge
pondered building into Angleton was the opportunity for a direct rail connection
to Brownsville to facilitate importing Mexican sugar cane. Doing so would have
eliminated the hauls of both the I-GN and the H&BV. The connection to
Brownsville was available on the St. Louis, Brownsville & Mexico (SLB&M) Railway
which had built through Angleton several years earlier. The SLB&M was part of the Gulf Coast Lines
(GCL) syndicate headed by B. F. Yoakum. Yoakum was a major force in midwest
railroading -- simultaneously Chairman of the St. Louis San Francisco ("Frisco") Railway,
a member of the Board of the Colorado & Southern Railway, and Chairman of the Executive Committee
of the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad. Yoakum was also a native Texan
who had worked for three Texas railroads. He knew Texas and Texas railroading
very well. His plan for the GCL was to compete with Southern Pacific (SP) along
the Gulf Coast by completing a continuous route from Brownsville to New Orleans.
This was to be accomplished by acquiring railroads to fill specific gaps and
building new tracks where necessary. Houston would be the focal point for
operations, so Yoakum founded the Houston Belt &
Terminal (HB&T) Railway to provide switching services and to construct and
operate a union passenger depot in Houston.
With substantial corporate intrigue involving Yoakum
and SP, the SLB&M succeeded in building south from
Robstown to Brownsville in 1904. This gave the Valley its first access to
the national rail network through a connection to the Texas Mexican Railway line
from Robstown to Alice where a connection to the San Antonio & Aransas Pass
(SA&AP) Railway provided a route to the north. Yoakum then began building north
from Robstown with the goal of reaching Houston, passing through Angleton in
1905-06. Rather than go all the way into Houston, Yoakum
elected to stop at Algoa and negotiate trackage
rights from there to Houston on Santa Fe rails.
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Drainage infrastructure had
long been a major public policy issue in Brazoria County, yet Yoakum had
not anticipated the difficulty of building through the swamps and
marshes near the Brazos River. To preserve schedule, Yoakum
started building southwest from Algoa
through Angleton to the Brazos while continuing to build east from
Bay
City to the river.
Left:
The Alvin Sun of May 26, 1905 updated
the "Coast line" (GCL) progress south from Algoa through
Liverpool, anticipating that
grading would be complete to the river within 90 days.
Right: Seven months
later, the Brownsville Daily Herald of
December 5, 1905 reported that ties (but not rails) had been laid from
Angleton to Oyster Creek, less than half the distance from
Angleton to the Brazos River. Yet, the railroad was claiming "through
trains" by January 1, 1906, only three weeks away! The first
passenger train to make the trip through the Brazos bottomlands was a
VIP train to Galveston via Algoa on March 13, 1906. Regular service could not
commence because the grade, ballast and bridges between
Algoa and Bay City were determined to be insufficiently engineered to withstand the
rainy season in Brazoria County. Regular service through this track segment
did not begin until the summer of 1907, more than a year later. |
 |
The GCL syndicate was controlled by the Frisco, but
problems arose when the Frisco entered receivership in 1914. The GCL railroads
had financial commonality through the St. Louis Trust Co. which had backed the
syndicate, but they did not
have the top-level executive structure of a corporation -- individual GCL railroads were
managed cooperatively but
separately by Frisco executives. Thus, a reorganization was necessary so that a single
corporate entity could own and operate all of the component railroads. A new
parent company, the New Orleans, Texas & Mexico (NOT&M) Railway was incorporated
in 1916, with the SLB&M as one of its railroads. The NOT&M was, in essence, "the
GCL", and it operated independently into the 1920s.
When, the I-GN came
out of yet another receivership in 1922, it had more than 1,100 miles of track
in Texas, but its repeated financial reorganizations made it a good target for
takeover. The Frisco tried to buy it in 1922 but was rebuffed by the Interstate
Commerce Commission (ICC), which refused to approve the sale. Missouri Pacific
(MP) tried to buy the I-GN in 1924 as a means of gaining access to the Texas
market, but again, the ICC nixed the sale. But MP had a
fallback strategy; it helped to arrange for the NOT&M to buy the
I-GN, simply to keep it out of the hands of other competitors. The sale of the
I-GN to the NOT&M was approved by the ICC in June, 1924. MP was then able to buy
the NOT&M on January 1, 1925 with approval from the ICC. Thus, they acquired the
target I-GN along with all of the GCL railroads.
The other railroad in Angleton, the H&BV, was going through its own
significant ownership changes in this same timeframe. The H&BV had been able to
sustain a profitable business shipping sulfur from one of the world's largest
sulfur mines located at the new town of Freeport which had been founded in 1912
downriver from Velasco (and into which Velasco was absorbed in 1957). The H&BV had become half-owned
by the Missouri - Kansas - Texas ("Katy") Railroad in 1913, with Freeport sulfur
mining interests owning the other half. The Katy went into receivership in 1915,
and the Katy's share of the H&BV was sold to SP when the Katy
was reorganized in 1923. As the H&BV was an orphan in the SP rail network, not
connected to any other SP railroad, SP sold its interest to the NOT&M in
1924,
which also acquired the terminal railroad at Freeport and a branch line to
a large sulfur mine at Hoskins Mound. This gave the NOT&M ownership of both
railroads at Angleton, and likewise, MP's acquisition of the NOT&M
in 1925 gave it
ownership of both railroads. Although
under common
ownership, the SLB&M and H&BV continued to operate with their own names until 1956 when
they were fully merged into MP.
The H&BV / SLB&M crossing at Angleton was uncontrolled, hence all
trains were required to stop before proceeding across the diamond. The crossing
had existed since 1906, but apparently neither railroad had ever sought to have
it interlocked. It remained uncontrolled until July 22, 1929 when RCT
commissioned a 10-function mechanical cabin interlocker,
Tower 154, to begin operation at the Angleton crossing. Whether or not the MP
union depot existed at that time is unknown; if not, a cabin was used to house
the electronics until the depot was built adjacent to the crossing. The interlocking plant and its
controls were ultimately housed in the depot, which bore white placards with the number
"154" on the two sides of the building visible to train crews to
denote the presence of Tower 154. This was one of ten interlocking plants involving the SLB&M to be commissioned in the 13
months between September 10, 1928 and October 1, 1929, but the motivation for
this flurry of interlocker construction on the SLB&M is unknown. The
first of these was a manned tower, Tower 138 in
Harlingen; the other nine were cabin interlockers at Angleton,
Allenhurst, Blessing,
Placedo, Edinburg
(two), Edcouch, Lantana
and Rosita.
Above Left: This excerpt from a 1949
article in Railway Age (Vol. 127, No. 6)
describes the replacement of the Tower 154 mechanical interlocker with a new
Centralized Traffic Control (CTC) machine "located in an office at Angleton...",
most likely the MP depot.
CTC control extended from Algoa to Vanderbilt, a town on the SLB&M about 80
rail miles south of Angleton.
In the years before RCT began to allow
automatic interlockers in 1930, cabin interlockers were
used for
situations in which the use of a manned tower was not cost-effective. The most
common was where a lightly used branch line crossed a main line. In that
situation, the staffing expense of a manned tower could not be justified since
the signals were almost always set to allow unrestricted movement on the main
line, i.e. there was little for an operator to do. A trackside "cabin" (a small hut
with a lockable door) would be built to house the interlocking plant and its
controls, and a member of the train crew on the lightly used line would enter
the cabin and operate the controls to signal a "Stop" condition on the main line
to allow his train to cross. When the train had passed, the crewmember would
return the control to the normal position granting unrestricted movements on the
main line. Main line traffic would never see a "Stop" condition except when the
crossing was actually occupied.
When a cabin-type interlocker was to be located
near a depot, it made sense to house the equipment and controls in the depot
instead of a separate cabin, and often there would be someone in the depot
trained to operate the system (typically the telegraph operator, if one was on
duty.) Although the documentation has not been located, the ten functions of the
Tower 154 interlocker were undoubtedly as follows: a derail in all four
directions, a home signal in all four directions and a distant signal on the
SLB&M tracks in both directions. Distant signals warned approaching trains on
whether they needed to plan to stop at the crossing. They were not needed on the
H&BV tracks because every H&BV train stopped at
the home signal by the diamond to wait for the controls to be changed
authorizing it to proceed. The Tower 154 plant and controls were eliminated when
the CTC system was installed in 1949.
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Left: This map shows the post-1926 railroad
network near Angleton (not all tracks are shown.) Through its NOT&M (GCL) subsidiary, MP
acquired the Sugar Land Railway (SLRy) in 1926. The goal of the SLRy extension
from House Junction to Anchor in 1916 had been the potential to lower
raw material costs by routing sugar
cane imports through Velasco instead of Galveston.
Rail access
via Angleton for cane imports from Mexico on the SLB&M was also a consideration. Whether
either of these goals was ever achieved by the SLRy is undetermined. But
once MP owned both the SLRy and the I-GN, the route from Anchor to
Hawdon on the I-GN Columbia Tap branch offered a superior alternative to
the parallel SLRy. MP abandoned the 21 miles of SLRy track between House
Junction and Anchor in 1932.
The Columbia Tap was one of the
early railroads in Texas, officially the Houston Tap & Brazoria
Railway. The Tap ran from downtown Houston
south to the east bank of the Brazos River at East Columbia, arriving
there in 1860 and earning the nickname "Columbia Tap" (a nickname still
in use.) The plan to build a bridge across the Brazos was thwarted by
the outbreak of the Civil War. Although it never did cross the river,
the Columbia Tap had a reliable business hauling people, raw materials
and finished products for the many sugar refineries and plantations in
the area. It was acquired by the Houston & Great Northern (H&GN) in
1873, and a few months later, the H&GN merged with the International
Railroad to create the I-GN.
The SLRy line from House Junction to
Hawdon remained in service so the SLRy could continue to access Houston
via the Columbia Tap. North of Sugarland Junction, the SLRy tracks went
to Tower 114 near downtown Sugarland. Thus,
SLRy passenger trains from Sugarland to Houston
had an unusual route that headed due south, away from Houston, to reach
Hawdon where the trains turned back to the north to go into Houston on
the Columbia Tap.
During MP's major reorganization in 1956, the
I-GN, H&BV and SLB&M became fully integrated into MP and no longer
operated under their original names. MP's Columbia Tap branch was
abandoned in stages: south of Anchor in 1956, south of Rosharon in 1962,
south of Hawdon in 1987, and south of Arcola in 1999. Today, the tracks
curve west immediately south of Arcola and enter an aggregates yard
owned by CEMEX.
When MP abandoned the Columbia Tap from Rosharon to
Anchor, it also abandoned the former H&BV tracks from Angleton to
Anchor; they served no purpose since the I-GN and SLRy tracks at Anchor
were already gone. All
Freeport shipping was being routed on the former SLB&M via Algoa, where
Yoakum was able to negotiate trackage rights (in 1908) on the GC&SF to
Houston via the branch line at Alvin. That branch led directly to
Tower 81 and into
New South Yard built by Yoakum's Houston Belt & Terminal Railway.
In 1924, the H&BV built a branch line to Hoskins, site of a major
sulfur mine. The branch was abandoned by MP in stages beginning in 1970.
Besides Tower 154 at Angleton, there were three additional numbered
interlocking towers on this map. Towers 161 and
162 at Arcola and Sugarland Junction, respectively, became
operational in July, 1930. Tower 65 at
Algoa operated between 1906 and 1911. |
Union Pacific (UP) acquired MP in 1982 and operated it as a
subsidiary until it was fully merged in 1997. The GC&SF became part of the
Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway in 1887 until it was fully merged in
1965. Santa Fe merged with Burlington Northern in
1995 to create Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF.) UP still operates the rights
between Houston and Algoa via Alvin that were negotiated by Yoakum. The tracks
on the above map that remain operational are the
GC&SF (now BNSF), UP's former SLB&M line south
of Algoa, UP's former H&BV branch from Angleton to
Freeport (not including the branch to Hoskins), and UP's Columbia Tap tracks
north of Arcola.
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Left: These track charts (courtesy Ed
Chambers) were produced by the Katy Railroad's Texas-based engineering
department in 1915. The Katy maintained track charts for almost every
significant crossing or junction in Texas, regardless of whether their
railroad was involved. The significant feature of the Angleton chart is
that it shows two depots, neither of which is particularly close to the
crossing. At some point, a combined MP depot for both railroads was
built near the crossing.
Right: Since the chart
is dated the year prior to the arrival of the SLRy at Anchor,
it does not show the SLRy. It does show a depot; the town
thrived prior to WWI, but lost its post office in 1920. |
 |
Below: These undated photos of the SLB&M (left) and H&BV
(right) depots at Angleton might show the structures that were present at the time the Katy
track chart above was created. (Brazos County Historical Museum images)
Above Left: This Google Earth image
from 2018 shows the remaining tracks near the Tower 154 crossing, now Angleton
Junction. The former
SLB&M crosses the image diagonally, showing the tail end of a northbound UP
train heading for Algoa. The former H&BV tracks only head due south now, but
they previously continued north across the SLB&M toward Anchor. Angleton Yard just beyond the left edge of the image dates back at least to the early
1980s, but it was expanded significantly in 2018 to add a Storage In Transit
yard with a capacity of 1,100 cars. The substantial rail infrastructure in this
region is due to the numerous petrochemical plants nearby and the Port of
Freeport, which handled 30 million tons
of freight in 2020. Above Right:
What appears to be the former MP freight depot in Angleton is now in use as a UP
office. (Jim King photo, 2006) Below Left:
Looking generally west, a BNSF train with Canadian National #2550 as the
trailing engine passes through Angleton heading southwest toward Bay City,
exercising BNSF rights to use UP's former SLB&M route. The track in the foreground is the southeast connector to the
Freeport line to the south (left edge of the image). Hopper cars on the
southwest connector in the distance are being pulled by a UP train into Angleton
Yard. (Jim King photo, 2006) Below Right: Looking south from the north side of
the former Tower 154 crossing, the sign sits on the former H&BV right-of-way
to Anchor. (Jim King photo, 2006)
Above: Two Google Street Views of UP's former SLB&M line
taken from the Loop 274 overpass: southwest (left)
and northeast (right)
