To raise money and awareness for the Temple Railroad and Heritage Museum, more than 130 men, women and children – ages 3 to 91 – climbed aboard the Hill Country Flyer in Cedar Park on Saturday morning. The 2,400-horsepower diesel-electric locomotive set a leisurely pace, pulling 11 passenger cars, each 80 feet long, 33 miles to the Hill Country town of Burnet. Representing several decades of America’s railroad past, a 1950s Pullman, a 1920s open window coach, and other vintage cars turned heads as they rumbled along.
Softball players in Liberty Hill stopped their game and waved. A mother with a toddler hanging on her hip stood at a railroad crossing and pointed at the big choo choo. And a group of five stopped their car and got out just to look and wave.
With a train whistle blowing in the background, and railcars rocking side to side, the museum’s executive director, Judy Covington, said the museum plays an important role in celebrating Temple’s railroad heritage.
“It (Temple) evolved from the railroads. And there’s an amazing texture of history that we should never forget that is really the foundation upon which Temple was built,” Ms. Covington said.
Saturday’s train trip raised $3,600. The museum, which opened in 1973, is a privately managed, non-profit entity. Ms. Covington said it is the No. 1 tourist destination in Temple. The museum is housed in a restored Santa Fe depot on Avenue B and offers interactive exhibits and archives going back about 100 years. According to their Web site, the archives are an important tool for researchers across the nation.
But Ms. Covington said railroad history is still being made today, right here in Temple.
“It’s not all old stuff, because if you stood outside the museum you would see trains moving endlessly through the rail yard. They carry so much freight, they are so important to our lives,” Ms. Covington said. “We don’t even realize it’s a major form of transportation.”
The Temple group left the Santa Fe depot in two large travel buses early Saturday morning. But about 25 others had to drive because the buses were filled.
With a cool fog hanging in the air, a group of five women friends from Temple settled in their bench seats in an 80-year-old passenger car. Longtime Temple resident Nancy Ferguson said the experience rekindled childhood memories.
“My family used to ride trains from Austin to Longview – when I was a little girl – to go visit grandparents,” Ms. Ferguson said. “We also went out to Disneyland in California on a train. We’d wander down through the cars looking around.”
During the trip, the all-volunteer crew worked hard to ensure the Temple group came away from the depot that afternoon with some stories to tell their grandchildren.
Crew chief Roger Shull pointed to Volkswagen-sized granite boulders on the side of the tracks that fell from railcars over a century ago. The granite had been quarried near Burnet and was destined for the state capitol, then under construction. But cars often turned over back then, and since the granite had been donated, it was more economical to simply leave it.
Because trains ride so much higher off the ground than automobiles, and their tracks follow different routes than highways, some unusual closeups kept the riders entertained. Like lyrics from a folk song, the steel wheels traveled past a graveyard, a junkyard, a limestone quarry, and made it easy to peek over wooden fences into backyards.
At the end of the run, Shull explained why he and others donate their time.
“If you didn’t come, we would be stuck at home playing with toy trains. So thank you for letting us play with a real train.”
Museum Web site: www.rrhm.org
