Fort Worth’s bomber railroad spur was the little track that helped US win World War II

Only five miles long, it was abandoned and forgotten in its final years and became so obscured by vegetation that you’d never know it was there.

But beginning in 1941 it helped to win a war.

Early that year, before Japan ever dropped a single bomb at Pearl Harbor, Fort Worth looked like a city preparing to go to war. The city and federal government announced plans to build a plant to build bomber planes and an adjacent airfield from which those planes would be flown and their pilots trained.

But how would materials to build the plant and materials to build the bombers get to the site? How would the airfield get fuel for its bombers?

Star-Telegram publisher Amon Carter answered that question with a short sentence tucked into his statement recognizing all the organizations that had helped secure the plant and airfield for Fort Worth and outlining some of the responsibilities of the city to support the plant and airfield:

“The site will require a spur track.”

With the “I think I can, I think I can” determination that had brought the railroads, the packing plants and the military bases of World War I to town, Fort Worth quickly got to work.

In May, the government contracted with the Texas & Pacific railroad to build a five-mile spur track from the T&P’s main track in southwest Fort Worth to the bomber plant site.

By early June the bomber spur was almost completed.

In August the first shipment of a 26,000-ton order of Bethlehem steel arrived via the bomber spur: seven flat cars carrying 5-ton steel columns for the outer walls of the assembly building.

One month later, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor would justify the expense and labor of building the bomber plant and the bomber spur and intensify the need to build the airfield to train pilots to fly the bombers.

By August 1942, a contract to build Tarrant Field Airdrome had been let.

A month later the airfield was built and occupied by bomber crews-in-training.

By 1943, a branch of the bomber spur had been laid to a tank farm on the east perimeter of the airfield to provide fuel via tank cars for the airplanes being built at the bomber plant and flown from the airfield.

On Sept. 2, 1945,the war that the bomber spur helped win formally ended.

In 1966, the airfield (by then known as Carswell Air Force Base) was still using the bomber spur to receive aviation fuel. Eventually, however, fuel was delivered to Carswell by a pipeline, and aircraft components were delivered to the bomber plant by trucks.

The bomber spur became obsolete and was abandoned.

But today you can still find remnants of the track:

• A scar across the 7000 block of West Vickery Boulevard indicates where the track crossed.
• A disembodied section of track still crosses the 4300 block of Southwest Boulevard.
• Bridge abutments remain on both sides of the 7000 block of Camp Bowie Boulevard.
• A bridge to nowhere crosses over the West Freeway.
• Scars are visible across the two western entrances to Ridgmar Mall.

And two more remnants: The next time you drive along Alta Mere Drive on the west side of Ridgmar Mall, look to the east at the line of trees between the two entrances to the mall. Those trees line King’s Branch creek. Over that creek lie the remains of two wooden railroad trestles of the little track that went to war.

Mike Nichols blogs about Fort Worth history at www.hometownbyhandlebar.com.