Research: Tram & Railroad Database

Code: 210
Corporate Name: Sabine & East Texas Railway Company (Texas & New Orleans)
Folk Name:
Incorporated:
Ownership: (Texas New Orleans in 1882)
Years of Operation:
Track Type:
Standard Gauge Wooden Rails
Track Length:
Locations Served: 1881: Beaumont to Sabine Pass, 30.17 miles 1881: Beaumont to Kountze, 24.40 miles 1882: Kountze to Rockland, 48.66 miles Jefferson
Counties of Operation:
Line Connections:
Track Information:
Tram Road Logging / Industrial Common Carrier Logging Camp
Equipment:
History: On April 29, 1880, J. F. Crosby, P. B. Watson, and J. J. Owen, chartered the East Texas Railway Company to build a railroad over the original path of the Eastern Texas Railroad from Beaumont to Sabine Pass, which had been abandoned and decaying since the Civil War years. Besides opening Beaumont businesses with the Gulf, the great pineries to the north provided the timber that the great Beaumont lumber plants needed. Rafting the logs down the Sabine and Neches rivers was a tricky business complicated often by low waters, the end result leaving the mills with orders they could not fill. The incorporators interested the Kountze brothers, who owned extensive stumpage in East Texas as far north as Tyler County. The construction project moved quickly, with the thirty miles to Sabine Pass finished in January 1881 and the twenty-four miles north to Kountze in July 1881. The following March, another forty-eight miles to Rockland were completed. Later, in August, the name was changed to the Sabine and East Texas Railway Company. Crosby had a business relationship with the Texas & New Orleans, of which C. P. Huntington was president. Huntington desired to access the East Texas pineries for shippage purposes. Instead of building his own lines, he purchased others, among them the Houston East & West Texas and the Sabine and East Texas. The latter was formally transferred on October 28, 1882. Almost seventeen years later, the Texas Legislature approved the T & N O to hold and operate the Sabine and East Texas if it would extend its connection 164 miles north to the Texas Trunk Railroad Company, another T & NO holding. The T & N O moved efficiently, reaching Dorr Junction in 1902, an extension of 47.8 miles, and another 21.3 miles to Cushing, in February 1903. At the same time, the Texas Trunk was being pushed south. The final link from Mahl to Jacksonville was finished that same year of 1903.