On the Move

Live steam coming to San Antonio

1925 Baldwin steam locomotive at Pearl Brewery

Question:  How do you return a long dormant steam locomotive back to active passenger service in 2010, with all the heightened concerns about safety?  Answer:  Very, very carefully.  This ain’t 1964.  Way back then early Texas Transportation Museum members including one Dave Wallace, acquired the 1925 Baldwin 0-4-0 steam locomotive from New Braunfels where it had sat idled in a shed since being retired around 1928, brought it to San Antonio, placed it on tracks adjacent to Pearl Brewery, simply filled the boiler with water and fired it up.  While it didn’t explode, it sent out enough smuts and soot that those same volunteers ended up cleaning car windshields for several blocks around. more »

100th anniversary of San Antonio’s first traffic laws

Lewis bzirdsong in a 1910 Franklin on College Street, San Antonio

It is, of course, one of the more minor centennial occasions.  You probably won’t celebrate it but you will, without noticing, except for this little reminder, observe it.  February 7, 2010 is the 100^th anniversary of San Antonio’s first traffic ordinance.  Nine years after the first gasoline powered horseless carriage, eight years after the city gained its first automobile agency, seven after the creation of the San Antonio Automobile Club, and six years after the city mandated that all vehicles be registered and display ID plates or numbers, the city introduced written rules for all road users. more »

2010 prospects for the Texas Transportation Museum

1925 Baldwin 0-4-0 steam locomotive

I thought I might take a moment to let y’all know about how things are going at the Texas Transportation Museum here in San Antonio.  Founded on January 1, 1964, TTM is gearing up for its 50^th Anniversary.  There are a number of projects that have the potential to elevate the institution from a relatively small city concern to a statewide attraction. more »

TxDOT’s $1 billion accounting gaffe explained

During last night’s Texas Republican primary debate, Debra Medina and Kay Bailey Hutchison both mentioned TxDOT’s 2008 accounting error, with both saying that TxDOT lost $1 billion.  Sadly, these are people who are running for governor and even they just can’t get basic facts right.  Now I realize that for folks running for office and/or wanting to besmirch TxDOT, saying they lost $1 billion is a great talking point.  But the anticlimactic fact is this: no money was ever lost.

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Book review: Traffic, by Tom Vanderbilt

I’ve just finished reading “TRAFFIC,” by Tom Vanderbilt, published by Vintage Books in 2009.  It is subtitled, “Why we drive the way we do and what it says about us.”  I heartily recommend it to anyone interested in trying to understand the mundane yet highly complex activity we call driving.

New TexasHighwayMan.com online!

Happy New Year everyone!

Since Thanksgiving, I’ve been working almost daily on the big upgrade to my website, and I’m happy to announce that it’s done and now online!

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Pigs will fly!

As a married man of a certain age, one expects to be given Yuletide tasks.  It is a given that your regular round will be interrupted with missions for which it could be said you are not the most adapted member of the family.  But it came to pass this holiday season that my dear wife provided me with one of the most extraordinary chores I have ever had to perform at this or any other Christmas.  It involves flying pigs at the Mexican border.

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Where’s the Loop 1604 Christmas tree?

Sorry for the lack of posts lately.  Been busy working on my big website update as well as the usual holiday tasks.

Speaking of the holidays, for the past few years, somebody has always decorated one of the trees in the median between the Loop 1604 mainlanes and frontage roads around Christmastime, usually in the vicinity of Blanco, Huebner, or Bitters.  This year, I haven’t spotted one.  Has anyone seen it?  If not, I wonder what happened to the person who used to do it.

Transportation Museum Christmas Show

It’s been a while since I posted here but I’ve been busy setting up “Santa’s railroad Wonderland” at the Texas Transportation Museum.  In its eleventh year, this eight night event has become a significant source of revenue for this small, independent museum, which receives no government funding of any kind, from city, county, state and federal levels. So we get by, solely, on visitor support.  We must be doing something right because we are still here after 45 years.

 Click http://www.txtransportationmuseum.org/SHD.htm for more information about “Santa’s Railroad Wonderland.”

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TexasHighwayMan.com update coming soon

If you’ve visited my website lately, you’ve probably noticed that it hasn’t been updated in a while (since May in fact.) I’ve had a busy summer– a big project at work that invaded some of my free time, the duties of being the father of a now 14-month old (which I have loved every minute of), and the time I’ve invested into this new blog have all left precious little time for keeping-up my website.

However, the blessings of time-off for the holidays and some personal leave will allow me to completely update and overhaul my site, hopefully by New Year’s Day. In addition to updating all the information, I will be improving the design and format, dropping some obsolete pages, and slightly re-organizing the remaining pages to be more logical and easier to navigate. My companion site about Germany will see a similar face lift shortly thereafter.

So let me offer my apologies for allowing my site to go stale.  I hope you’ll enjoy the new site!