Texas Transportation Museum

Mission:

Texas Transportation Museum is a volunteer lead organization that collects, preserves and displays transportation equipment and related items. We operate a working passenger railroad, several model train layouts and many road vehicles. We provide an educational and entertaining experience which interprets how developments in transportation technology shaped and continue to impact daily life.

History:

The Texas Transportation Museum was created in 1964 to help preserve artifacts and information about the varied elements of San Antonio's fascinating transportation history. We operate as much of our collection as possible. This includes our volunteer built full sized railroad and many vehicles. The museum was originally located at the Pearl Brewery near downtown and used the tracks of its short line railroad, the Texas Transportation Company. In 1967 the museum was granted use of approximately forty acres of what was then known as the Northeast Preserve, now McAllister Park, just north of the International Airport on Wetmore Road. 

Everything you find at this site, which we have been developing since then was either built by volunteers or donated to the museum, which is a registered 501(c)(3) charity. We acquired an historic depot, built our own tracks, acquired four locomotives (two steam and two diesel electrics), two historically significant railroad cars and five cabooses. In addition we built a huge work building that can accommodate our locomotives, a 100 X 50 foot display building which houses our road vehicle collection. a vast indoor HO scale layout and much on our historical artifact collection. Our extensive ground contains our railroad, half of which is mainline track. We also built the largest public G, or garden scale outdoor layout in Texas. We participate in many San Antonio public events. both large and small. Our vehicles are almost fixtures in all of the Fiesta parades plus other event like the St. Patrick's Day parade and the San Antonio Founders Day event held at San Pedro Park in the Fall. We have great relations with the San Antonio Parks & Recreation Department, the San Antonio Conservation Society, The Daughters of the Texas Republic, the Institute of Texan Cultures, the Witte Museum, the Pioneer Hall and many other prominent civic organizations.