During Grapevine's early development, large family land holdings east and west of Main Street supported self-sufficient households and a small but strong community whose citizens established businesses and services for settlers' needs and lobbied for a railroad line through town. Rail service arrived in 1888 with the St. Louis, Arkansas and Texas Railway, nicknamed the Cotton Belt, bringing prosperity by linking Grapevine with Fort Worth to the west and St. Louis to the east and providing inexpensive transportation for local farm produce. Grapevine grew as an agricultural trade center, with businesses supporting shipment of commodities, speculators buying crops and cotton futures, and new access to nails, roofing, lime, cement, and milled lumber that helped drive a construction boom, especially on Main Street, from about 1890 to 1920. In the twentieth century, the railroad carried soldiers through town during World War I, while truck farming expanded with rail shipping and increased traffic near the depot led to construction of an underpass in 1928 near the depot to eliminate a hazardous grade crossing. The Great Depression and competition from automobiles and trucks sharply reduced rail traffic, leading to gradual withdrawal of service, sale of the line to the Southern Pacific Company, reduction of the depot, and eventual closure and relocation of the depot in the 1970s. Local preservation efforts then helped turn the depot into a museum, and in 1996 steam excursion service between Grapevine and the Fort Worth Stockyards began as the Grapevine Vintage Railroad, supported by the relocation of the Santa Fe Railroad turntable from Saginaw to turn the 1896 steam engine called Putty. In the 1990s the depot was moved back to Main Street and the Cotton Belt Railroad Industrial Historic District was established and listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Grapevine later embraced rail again as a path to growth, approving funding for commuter rail in 2006, planning Grapevine Main as a transit-oriented development, and beginning new commuter rail service on December 31, 2018, while the historic Cotton Belt depot continued in service for the Grapevine Vintage Railroad.