Fallen Flags: Santa Fe Remembered

The Santa Fe is a special railroad. Not, in my mind, for its glamorous paint scheme, top-notch passenger trains, or even its famed Alco PAs, however. No, the Santa Fe should be admired for its longevity in an industry fraught with turmoil. Rival Southern Pacific was acquired by the smaller Rio Grande in 1989 (only to end up as the surviving name). Stalwart Union Pacific acquired Missouri Pacific in 1982, but then looked and operated a lot like the MoPac throughout the remainder of the decade. Nevermind the loss of the Katy, Milwaukee, and The Rock. Santa Fe, however, lasted another decade on its own, and many of its routes remain integral to the modern BNSF Railway network. I’m proud to celebrate that longevity here, from Wally Abbey’s January 1955 Trains…

The photo on the cover of this special issue didn’t happen by accident. It was the result of a lot of planning that, due to the fickle nature of weather, almost went for naught. Here’s the story. In 1989, Santa Fe’s corporate communications department received a request from Tokyo-based K-Line, one of its international transportation customers, for a photograph of one of its container trains. The shipper wanted to hang a giant print in its home office. The Chicago-headquartered railroad tasked Mike Martin, its Los Angeles-based public relations representative, to handle the details. Martin quickly organized a working group of employees to determine the best way to complete the request and at the same time not interrupt the railroad’s busy mainline schedule. Mike’s good reputation and years of closely working with Southern California-based…

“THE SANTA FE is the best thing that ever happened to Emporia. It is one of the best things that ever happened to Kansas. It is easily one of the best things that ever happened to this land.”William Allen WhitePioneer editor Emporia, Kansas COLONEL CYRUS K. HOLLIDAY found himself politely indulged by his Topeka neighbors that blustery October afternoon in 1868. They were, he suggested from a livery hack doubling as a speaking platform, about to make history. By turning a few ceremonial shovelfuls of Kansas soil, he said, they would embark on the construction of a great iron highway from Topeka west toward Santa Fe and east toward Kansas City, an enterprise that would succeed the fabled Santa Fe Trail known to legions of oxen-drawn pioneers and pull the Southwest…

There is a legend that on an April day in 1869 Cyrus K. Holliday stood in a grove at Wakarusa, Kan., beside the grade of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe and made a speech that set the very trees a-humming. It was a momentous occasion, and Colonel Holliday did right well with the fancy words. For after all, the first train had chugged seven miles up along Shunganunga Creek from Topeka on the line he’d fathered. Colonel Holliday’s railroad was on its way to Santa Fe! Time has mellowed the story of that ringing address, but it would seem that in his boundless enthusiasm the Colonel envisioned Santa Fe, that romantic trading post at the end of a 780-mile wagon trail, and legendary points flung far beyond as just down the…

ON YULETIDE NIGHTS, I often pluck from my bookcase the worn copy of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and return once more, as the clock strikes 1, to the darkened bed chamber of Ebenezer Scrooge. Even as he calls on Ebenezer, the Ghost of Christmas Past appears before me, and he draws me back into the mists of memory. He leads me back to a Christmas Eve when the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe was still a railroad in the passenger business; still a railroad wrapped in silver, ribboned with red, yellow, and black; and sealed not with a bow but with a warbonnet. It was a time now 15 years past, when I was a young man of 14 and the calendar read Dec. 24, 1967. The place was…

Dust off the bound many volumes of the railroad trade press for the year 1946, and you will find them thick with coated stock and frequently with full-color ad plates of steam’s pallbearers. Come-from-behind GM, now the heavy weight, was there with its Es and Fs, of course. There, too, were Fairbanks-Morse, shifting from scales to OPs, and durable old Baldwin, trying to make up its mind (and Pennsy’s) between Centipedes and Tls. Perhaps most exciting of all in retrospect, there was an impassioned, no-holds-barred pitch for a machine billed simply as the “2000.” She was Alco-GE’s A1A-A1A of her code designation’s horsepower, available in cab or booster carbody, advertised to operate a million miles before major overhaul, extolled for possessing one engine and five linear feet less than the passenger unit…