Passenger Train Service
When MCSA operations began in 1898, Texas law required railroads to operate passenger service in order to claim common carrier status. In 1927, the railroad's original passenger car was replaced by a wood combine car built in 1898 for the Long Island Rail Road. It would be the last passenger car ever owned by the MCSA.
In its early years, the railroad provided a vital link to the outside world for the residents of Camden. Ridership declined sharply in the 1930s as highways were constructed in the area and automobiles and buses became more popular. However, passenger service remained profitable enough to justify its continuation. In the 1950s, its popularity increased as tourists and railfans became attracted to the pleasant East Texas forest scenery, the old-fashioned wood combine, the rustic wooden train station at Camden, and the steam locomotives. Other attractions in Camden included the quaint, old-fashioned company store and the “Locomotive Graveyard”, a portion of the railroad yard where a number of old MCSA and W.T. Carter steam locomotives had been left to decay in the elements.
In the 1960s and early 1970s, passenger service remained popular despite dieselization of the MCSA and discontinuation of regular connecting passenger service by the Southern Pacific Railroad at Moscow. After the line was purchased by Champion International, the new owners became concerned about the possibility of civil liability in the event of an accident, especially given the age of the railroad’s 1898 wood combine. Passenger service was finally discontinued in July 1973.
Read more about this topic: Moscow, Camden And San Augustine Railroad
Famous quotes containing the words passenger, train and/or service:
“Every American travelling in England gets his own individual sport out of the toy passenger and freight trains and the tiny locomotives, with their faint, indignant, tiny whistle. Especially in western England one wonders how the business of a nation can possibly be carried on by means so insufficient.”
—Willa Cather (1876–1947)
“Happy you poets who can be present and so present by a simple flicker of your genius, and not, like the clumsier race, have to lay a train and pile up faggots that may not after prove in the least combustible!”
—Henry James (1843–1916)
“The service a man renders his friend is trivial and selfish, compared with the service he knows his friend stood in readiness to yield him, alike before he had begun to serve his friend, and now also. Compared with that good-will I bear my friend, the benefit it is in my power to render him seems small.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)