Chartered in August 1900 and headquartered in the sawmill town of Keltys, the Angelina and Neches River Railroad (A&NR) began as a small shortline railroad to move logs from the woods of east Texas to the mills of the Angelina County Lumber Company. Principal founding partners: Joseph H. Kurth, Sr., S.W. Henderson, Sr., Eli Wiener and Sam Wiener, all officers in the Angelina County Lumber Company, joined the growing trend of lumber company industrialists who branched out into the railroad business about the turn of the 20th century. The A&NR began with ten miles of track and two wood-burning narrow-gauge steam locomotives.

In 1906, the line added 2.54 miles of track, with its eastern terminus at Alco, a logging camp owned by the lumber company. Two new locomotives were purchased to accommodate the conversion of the track from narrow to standard gauge. By 1911, A&NR's line extended to Chireno in Nacogdoches County. With the founding of Southland Paper Mills in 1938, made possible largely due to assets of the A&NR, the railroad expanded to haul in pulpwood and ship out newsprint made from Southern pine.

In the first 100 years, the Angelina & Neches River's shortline service played a key role in the economic development of Lufkin and other communities along the line. Its shortline service helped shape the success of Lufkin's largest corporations-companies like Lufkin Foundry and Machine Company, which made the oil field's first balance-type pumping unit; Southland Paper Mills, Inc., which pioneered the production of newsprint from southern pine trees; Angelina Plywood Company, which made some of the first southern pine plywood in the nation; and Texas Foundries, Inc., the first malleable iron foundry to be located south of St. Louis.

Paralleling the history of the A&NR is the history of Lufkin, which in 1900 was little more than a sleepy little sawmill town, barely eighteen-years-old, clinging to the tracks of the Houston, East and West Texas Railroad. At that time, the A&NR didn't even have a line into Lufkin.

Today, a century later, Lufkin and the Angelina and Neches River Railroad are inexorably intertwined as partners in growth and history. And East Texas is infinitely better for their partnership.*

*excerpts taken from A&NR: Up and Down the Line by Bob Bowman