It’s Worth Telling
The stories behind the stories...
The rider from Houston chuckled when two masked men—one brandishing a gun— suddenly emerged from the brush alongside the narrow-gauge railroad tracks and the miniature train jerked to a stop Good gag, the visitor to San Antonio thought—a fake Old West-style hold-up of Brackenridge Park’s popular ride, the Eagle. One of the men did seem to be treating the person sitting ahead of him a little roughly, but none of the other passengers seemed to be taking it seriously.
Even when the gunman held the weapon to his head, the 52-year-old Houston man kept laughing. But then the other masked man grabbed his wife’s purse. Finally, it sank in on the tourist and the other passengers that this wasn’t a routine stunt. The Eagle, a small-scale but realistic looking engine pulling a long line of open, canopy- topped passenger cars, had been hijacked by sure ‘nuff armed robbers.
The bandits struck about 1 p.m. Saturday, July 18, 1970, as the nearly full little train with 75 passengers began the eastern leg of its half-hour run. The crooks had picked their location well, stopping the Eagle as it rolled out of a tunnel south of the Witte Museum at a point it could not be seen from Broadway, a busy nearby thoroughfare. Waving a handgun at 24-year-old engineer Walter Lucas, who had just started working at the park, one of the men had shouted for him to put on the brakes.
Brazen as stopping the little train was, the two robbers nevertheless appeared nervous as they walked from car to car collecting cash and other valuables in a white laundry bag. The holdup men quickly disappeared after relieving the occupants of the last car of their valuables. Once they were gone, Lucas used a hand-held two-way radio to call for help.
The train, popular with locals and tourists alike, has been a Brackenridge Park fixture since 1956. The train, which ran along a 3.2-mile, one-fifthscale track was initially pulled by what looked like a mid-20th century diesel locomotive. But that engine was later replaced by a replica of a vintage steam locomotive. They called the engine Old No. 99.
When San Antonio police officers tallied the loss, it came to $500 in cash and other valuables, plus checkbooks, credit cards, car keys and cameras. Five hundred bucks was a lot of money back then, worth $4,000 today.
A major felony had taken place, but the caper was still hard for San Antonians to take seriously. “The Little Train Robbery/Brack Eagle Ambushed – Honest,” the San Antonio Light headline read the following morning. Two lengthy news articles gave full details of the unusual incident. The rival Express-News played it straighter: “2 Bandits/Rob Train in Park.”
Since train robbery is both a state and federal crime, the FBI joined in the investigation. But later that month it was another law enforcement agency—the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division—which received a tip that two Fort Sam Houston soldiers may have been the robbers.
Acting on that information, officers arrested two 21-year-old soldiers on July 27 and charged them with the crime. Both ended up serving prison time.
Unwittingly, the two G.I.’s had added to the Alamo City’s rich history. At that time, no other train—big or small— had been robbed in the Southwest since the summer of 1923. That was a century ago, and now more than a half-century has passed since the Little Train Robbery, a holdup that still stands as the Wild West’s last train robbery.
(This story is condensed from Mike Cox’s book ‘Wicked San Antonio’ (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2022).
An elected member of the Texas Institute of Letters, Mike Cox is the award-winning author of more than 40 nonfiction books. He and his wife Beverly escaped Austin for Wimberley in 2016.
