S.B. Moore started his career with the Southern Pacific Railway as a conductor in California and worked his way up to construction engineer for Southern Pacific lines running east of El Paso. We remember him now, not for working on the railroad, but for a weird idea he had to “improve” our early highways. 

Moore told a meeting of the New York Railroad Club in 1922 that the roads for cars and trucks were not nearly as durable as the tracks his crews laid down for the railroads. “Highway failures are due to the rut,” he declared, and shared with the railroad men his idea for what he called a Permanent Track Highway. It became better known as the Invisible Track Highway.

Moore’s highway featured four parallel tracks—one for each tire— with a surface of crushed stone and asphalt running between them. All the driver had to do was keep the car on the tracks, same as a railroad engineer. He pitched his idea to Texas Governor James “Pa” Ferguson, who might not or might not have understood the concept, or how it was supposed to work, but he was smart enough to know a money-skimming idea when he heard one. 

Texas only had about 100 miles of paved road in 1923 when the Texas Highway Department (now the Texas Department of Transportation) assumed responsibility for the maintenance of the state’s roads. Ferguson signed legislation creating the highway department in 1917, and for the rest of his public life he and his wife, Miriam “Ma” Ferguson, diverted every penny they could from the highway department to their own pocketbooks.  

Pa Ferguson made sure the first stretch of the experimental highway ran from Belton to Temple, in his home county of Bell. Hardware store owner Frank Denison became the project’s contractor despite having never built a single mile of road. Even so, Denison had a couple of bright ideas about how a road should be built. 

One was to use concave rollers to create “tracks” in the highway. He described it to Ferguson and the press as a “revolutionary” technology. The governor and the press seemed to take him at his word. 

Denison’s other bright idea was to subcontract the work to a pal in Fort Worth who agreed to buy everything he needed from Denison’s hardware store. Fred Ferguson, Pa’s cousin, sold most of the gravel used in the project and it must have been the best gravel in the world because it was surely the most expensive. 

Moore, the project’s original idea guy, signed on as a consulting engineer.  Local leaders declared the Invisible Track Highway the safest road in the world— the world!  

One of the few people who ever braved the road had a different take: “Once you got on, you had to stay on. You couldn’t get off anywhere except at the end. It was the stupidest design you ever saw. It was crazy.” Moore countered that the complaints came from speed demons “who never want to run less than 40 miles per hour.” 

The five miles of experimental road ended up costing somewhere around $250,000—about $3 million in today’s dollars. The state spent most of that money. Bell County pitched in but a pittance. A house committee investigating the peculiar highway and its finances called Moore to testify. 

Committee attorney Richard Critz asked Moore if he knew of another case where the state spent so much money without the county putting up its proper share. And why would the state spend so much money in Bell County, home of the governor?

“I think I can answer that,” Moore replied. “James Ferguson told me that, if the experimental road was a failure, he could explain it easier to the home people.” 

Well, he never got that chance. Ferguson’s deep attraction to larceny and his contempt for the rule of law led to his impeachment early in his second term. The impeachment included seven charges of misapplication of public funds and prohibited him from holding public office. No problem. Pa steered Ma Ferguson into the governor’s chair in 1925 and again in 1933. 

By the time the Fergusons rode off into the political sunset, the state had abandoned the so-called invisible highway but left it in disrepair as a visible reminder of the Fergusons’ foolishness and greed. The Invisible Track Highway became truly invisible in 1931 when the highway department finally paved over it.