About the Texas Transportation Archive

The TTA is the volunteer effort of researchers Murry Hammond and Lester Haines to provide access to their private collections of material related to historic transportation topics in Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Arkansas. Primary emphasis is on railroads and those industries that operated their own railroad facilities, such as lumber mills, coal mines, and quarries. Secondary emphasis is on river navigation, early roads and highways, and aviation. Everything on the TTA is free to access, and we encourage the use of our materials for educational purposes. Proper credit is always appreciated where appropriate. We hope you find something useful to your research.

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Lester Haines

Lester's interest in Texas transportation history began at an early age. He learned much of his research skills while still in his teens in the 1960s, when he set about to document the railroad history of Central Texas and especially that of the area around Fredricksburg, Texas. He sought out employees to interview, recovered and preserved artifacts and save rare paper documents. The fruits of his early research would be seen years later when Lester began publishing his Journal of Texas Shortlines and Transportation magazine, which he did throughout the 1990's. Lester is a minister of the Gospel and when he's not researching or working on the preservation aspect of his collections, he busies himself with disaster relief work, an acitivity that sends him all over the region. Lester lives with his wife Nancy in Austin, Texas.

Murry Hammond

Murry is TTA's webmaster, creating and maintaining the site's databases and all internal content. Murry was raised west of Fort Worth in the little north Texas town of Boyd, and has spent his adult life in Dallas, Nacogdoches and now Pasadena, California, where he raises his little boy Tex. Murry calls himself a "citizen archivist" and regards the archive work he does with the TTA as his life's work. Murry plays music for a living, having performed with Texas music legends Old 97's since 1992. The band regularly performed on the Tonight Show and David Letterman, on various music programs such as Austin City Limits, and as of 2016, has recorded 11 studio albums. Murry and Lester became friends when on a research trip Murry noticed in a library guest book that another person seemed to share his love of Texas railroad history. A phone call began a decades-long partnership that the two enjoy to this day. Murry lives in Pasadena, California but travels to Texas frequently to participate in his favorite sport, exploring the backroads of Texas doing research.