page_title: Cane Belt Railroad
section_title: 1905 to 1948
hierarchical_section_title: Cane Belt Railroad / 1905 to 1948
caption_attribution_description: English: The photo shows the W A Parish Power Plant near Thompsons, Texas. The unit shown burns coal. A second unit burns natural gas.
context_page_description: The Cane Belt Railroad was chartered in the U.S. state of Texas in 1898. Formed by a group of businessmen from Eagle Lake, the short-line railroad was intended to bring the area's sugarcane to market. In 1902 a disagreement between two of the railroad's chief promoters proved deadly. By 1904 the line was in operation from Sealy to Matagorda on the Gulf of Mexico. That year the company's stock was bought by the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway and the line continued operations under lease to the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway starting in 1905. By the 1920s, the local sugarcane industry collapsed but the railroad was saved by the discovery of two nearby sulphur mines. In 1948, the Cane Belt was merged into the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway. In the 1990s most of the original line was abandoned after the last sulphur mine closed. By 2013, only a small portion of the line south of Bay City was operating as part of the BNSF Railway.
context_section_description: Several events caused the downfall of the local sugarcane business. Sugarcane required an enormous amount of manual labor to cut and load into wagons. Since the local population could not meet the demand for workers, the planters leased convicts from the Texas penitentiary system. In 1898 about 700 prisoners were harvesting sugarcane. Mutinies among the convict crews occurred because of the harsh conditions in the cane fields. Molasses imported from abroad and sugar beets grown in the United States proved to be cheaper to convert into sugar. In 1910 the Texas legislature passed a law forbidding the leasing of convicts on humanitarian grounds. In December 1911 there was a hard freeze which destroyed half of the sugarcane crop. The Lakeside sugarcane refinery closed in 1911 and in 1918 its machinery was sold to a producer in Jamaica. By the 1920s the local sugarcane crop dwindled to insignificance. 
  However, as sugarcane shipments fell off, rice shipments on the railroad increased substantially. But the economic salvation of the railroad proved to be the discovery of sulphur deposits at Gulf Hill near Matagorda in 1917. The Gulf Hill mine was opened in 1919 and sulphur shipments were soon a large part of the railroad's traffic. In 1926 the Texas Railroad Commission determined the value of the Cane Belt Railroad at $2.5 million though evidence hinted that the real value may have been nearly $3.5 million. In the 1920s, another sulphur mine was found near Boling. On February 1, 1928, the Cane Belt asked the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) for permission to build a new line from Lane City to Thompsons. Previously, the sulphur was shipped to Sealy before it could connect to a rail line to Galveston. Construction of the new branch would shorten the rail distance to Galveston by 65 miles (105 km). Rejecting a competing bid, the ICC granted the Cane Belt the right to build the line by June 30, 1931 and the new track was rapidly laid. The Gulf Hill mine played out in 1937 but by this time the Boling mine was shipping large quantities of sulphur.
  By the 1930s the volume of agricultural traffic on the Cane Belt had steeply declined. In 1939, the railroad applied to the ICC to shut down the Bonus Loop from Bonus to Eldridge, the site of Eldridge's one-time plantation. The application was granted and service stopped on September 16, 1940. The Eldridge post office closed two years later. By this time shipments of rice, livestock, oyster shell for road surfacing and other freight began to fall. Sulphur was the backbone of the railroad. In 1945, in addition to 3,824 bales of cotton, the Cane Belt shipped 17,789 carloads of sulphur, 1,613 of oyster shell, 1,122 of petroleum products, 354 of rice and 82 of fruits and vegetables. The only fatal wreck during World War II claimed the lives of two brakemen when a train ran through an open switch. In those days brakemen earned $0.82 per hour.
  In the years after the war a train crew's workday usually started at Sealy at 6:45 am and ended at Matagorda at 10:45 pm. The crews stayed overnight in bunk cars at Matagorda and began the return journey the next day. Each train typically carried an engineer, fireman, conductor and two brakemen. During harvest season a third brakeman was added to the crews. Cane Belt service was unpopular and the more senior workers of the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe usually opted to work on the Galveston main line. Passenger service was included on the Cane Belt by attaching a car to the end of the trains. In December 1948, the Cane Belt was absorbed by the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway and the railroad ceased to exist.
caption: In Thompsons, part of the old Cane Belt right-of-way (right) is used to bring coal to the W A Parish power plant. The modern BNSF connecting line goes to the left across the road.
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