Chapter 9
The years between 1901 and 1922 were momentous in a number of ways for workers at the Albuquerque Locomotive Repair Shops and for the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway as a business. As historian Richard Frost notes, it was “the dramatic rise of Los Angeles [California] in the late 1890s and the early 1900s [that] made the Santa Fe a major transcontinental railroad.”1 AT&SF annual reports show that from 1900 through 1915 total annual operating revenue (freight and passenger) for the company jumped by almost two and a half times, from just over $48 million to $117.6 million. In 1915, the company proudly announced to its shareholders, “The year has been the largest as to earnings, both gross and net, in the history of the Company.” The management, considering only the most recent year, attributed the rise in earnings to “the unprecedented wheat crop of Kansas and the largely increased yield of agricultural products of all kinds in the so-called ‘Plains Country.’”2 The trend of earnings, though, had been upward in almost every one of the preceding sixteen years, suggesting that other factors besides just a single year’s bumper crop were multiplying business for the railroad. The mushrooming demands of Californians for manufactured goods as well as spectacular production of fresh fruits and vegetables that could now be shipped eastward in record time in refrigerated cars undoubtedly played a major part, as Frost suggests. Despite record income, the company complained about the shipping revenue lost because of the Panama Canal, which had just opened in August 1914. This again suggests the importance of California to the railroad, both as a shipper and as a destination for freight and passengers.
Despite record earnings, competition from ocean transport by way of the Panama Canal was not the only circumstance that AT&SF management publicly lamented. The cost of repairing locomotives and of maintaining and improving shops was rising alarmingly. Corporate annual reports for 1905 and 1915 recorded an increase in the operating costs of repair shops systemwide from $5.38 million to $8.1 million, a jump of nearly 51 percent.3 Naturally, wages constituted the major shop expense, which prompted this statement of grievance on behalf of the company in 1914: “As a class they [our employees] are a credit to themselves and the road. Left to themselves there would be little of which to complain, but the [labor] organizations as a body have been aggressively demanding increased wages for their members with no regard for the ability of their employers to pay, and have been steadily demanding, and frequently with success, many varieties of legislation.”4
Dramatically increased railroad traffic directly impacted work at the Albuquerque Locomotive Repair Shops.5 The number of AT&SF steam locomotives operating at the end of June 1915 was 2,105, up from 1,454 just ten years earlier, almost a 50 percent increase.6 That meant correspondingly more overhauls and more routine repairs had to be performed. As we will see in chapter 11, the dramatically increased workload, coupled with larger and larger locomotives, necessitated enlarging the Albuquerque Shops and significantly expanding the number of shopmen in all categories.
This report from October 1903 is one indication of the increasing size of AT&SF locomotives in the early 1900s: “The largest engine in the world, #989, which has been in the [Albuquerque] back shops [a term in general use for repair shops] being almost entirely reconstructed, will be turned out of the shops next week.”7 In 1903, Santa Fe #989 was an almost new locomotive with a 2–10–0 wheel configuration (with ten drive wheels), known as a decapod, a type particularly suited to mountainous regions. Another locomotive of the same class, built almost sixteen years later, was 71 feet long, including its tender, and weighed more than one hundred tons, which gives an approximation of the size of #989.8 The shopmen’s pride in having almost completely rebuilt the world’s then-largest locomotive is evident even in this matter-of-fact news note. A locomotive of that size would have just barely fit in the erecting bay of the old stone-walled machine shop, which was only 74 feet 10 inches wide. Even with its tender off, that would have left precious little maneuvering room around the locomotive.
At the same time that the rebuilt #989 was to be released for a test run, “the roof over the machine shops [was] nearing completion,” representing reconstruction after a recent fire. Such catastrophes were not unexpected at railroad repair shops, given the constant proximity of volatile substances, very hot metal, welds, frequent sparks, and reliance on wood-timber roof structures. In fact, in July 1904 and again in July 1922, the machine shop and much of the rest of the AT&SF–Gulf Lines locomotive repair complex at Cleburne, Texas, were consumed by huge fires.9 The Cleburne shops had exhibited many of the same characteristics that made the pre-1920s Albuquerque Repair Shops vulnerable to fire, including timber-frame roof structures. When a new shop complex was built at Cleburne between 1926 and 1930, it followed plans, methods, and materials very similar to those pioneered at Albuquerque in putting up the “state of the art” Shops from 1914 to 1924 (see chapter 11).
At Albuquerque itself, AT&SF made many adjustments and improvements to the Shops complex in addition to the wholesale rebuilding of the early 1920s. The diameter of the turntable, for instance, was lengthened twice during the early twentieth century, increasing from 54 feet in 1900 to 85 feet, and then to 120 feet in 1914. Because of the increasing length of locomotives, even that was not the final turntable diameter. In 1942, it was increased an additional 20 feet. Larger and larger boilers in locomotives also meant a need for larger and larger water storage tanks within the Shops complex—and more water wells to keep up with the burgeoning consumption of water at the Shops.10
All these developments brought with them a need for an increased workforce at the Shops. According to the 1910 Census, the number of hourly shopmen at Albuquerque was then under 500, but war in Europe stimulated train traffic in the United States, which relentlessly pushed the number of shopmen higher. In 1920, the number of hourly shopmen was 970. Including salaried shop staff, the city directory for 1919 indicated total employment at the Shops for that year of 1,195.11
One of the employees who joined the workforce of the Albuquerque Locomotive Repair Shops during the first two decades of the twentieth century was Joseph Swillum. He came to Albuquerque, by train naturally, in 1914 at age twenty-three with the University of Missouri glee club on a tour to California. One of the members of the singing group came down with smallpox upon arrival in Albuquerque, and as a result, the whole glee club was quarantined and could not continue the tour.
During his enforced stay in Albuquerque, Swillum became entranced by the growing city and its surroundings. He got to know people at the Shops and, as a recent college graduate, was offered and accepted a position as a special apprentice on July 6, 1914. His beginning pay was $1.75 a day. From then until 1957 he worked as an instructor at the Shops, guiding more than 1,500 AT&SF apprentices through the basics of math and mechanical engineering. From 8:00 a.m. till noon every workday, Joe prepared his lessons. After a four-hour break, he began his teaching day in the general office building, giving classes from 4:00 to 9:00 p.m.
The midday break suited Joe just fine. He became an avid and lifelong golfer, spending his Wednesday breaks during good weather at the Albuquerque Country Club, of which he was a founding member. He married Magdeleine Heibel in 1918, and they lived in an apartment on 3rd Street until 1927, when they purchased a house at 416 13th NW. The couple became good friends of the family of fellow AT&SF employee Amado Baca, as well as the grandchildren of former shopman David Keleher.12
Bonifacio Shaw, whose mother was from Isleta Pueblo, began work as a machinist at the Shops in about 1906, eight years before Joe Swillum. Bonifacio had a long career with AT&SF, retiring about 1960. He was both a player and a fan of baseball. As a perk of employment with the Santa Fe, as it was for all AT&SF employees, he had a pass for free travel on the train. He would frequently ride the train to Los Angeles, leaving Albuquerque late on a Friday. He would attend two Dodgers’ games over the weekend and be back in Albuquerque by Monday morning.
At noontime on workdays, Bonifacio would walk home from the Shops to 923 S. Arno for beans, red chile, and tortillas with butter, his usual lunch. His grandson Patrick Trujillo remembers that when Patrick was a young boy his grandmother, Margaret Armijo Shaw, would send him outside to sit on the fence to watch for when Bonifacio reached Broadway on his way home at midday. That way Patrick could run and tell his grandmother so that she would have Bonifacio’s lunch hot when he arrived.13
As time went on, the payroll at the Shops kept growing, and expansion at the Shops drove a similar increase in Albuquerque’s population. The 1920 census reported that Albuquerque was then home to 15,157 people, up 66.3 percent since 1910 and up an astounding 143 percent since 1900.14 By 1919, Albuquerque exhibited many of the characteristics of twentieth-century American urban life. There were, for example, thirty churches in Albuquerque: seven each that were Catholic and Methodist Episcopal; two each were Baptist, Christian Science, Episcopal, Lutheran, and Presbyterian; one each were Christian, Congregational, Church of Christ, Seventh Day Adventist, and a Gospel Hall—and there was a Jewish synagogue. The YMCA, at the corner of Central Avenue and 1st Street, was a frequent after-hours haunt for shopmen. On account of the Y’s presumed beneficial effect on employees’ spirits and behavior, it enjoyed financial support from the Santa Fe.15
With AT&SF’s presence and permanence in Albuquerque established, other large industrial enterprises were able to capitalize on the continental reach of the railroad:
Soon after the turn of the [twentieth] century, a second major industrial employer arrived in the city—the American Lumber Company—whose fortunes were also tied to the railroad. Incorporated in 1901, the company purchased timber lands in the Zuni Mountains, some 100 miles west of Albuquerque, and in 1903 the company was ready to build a sawmill and associated woodworking factories on 110 acres of former agricultural land just northwest of the city limits. The sawmill plant and other buildings were connected by a railroad spur to the AT&SF’s main line. This allowed easy access for incoming shipments of logs cut in the white pine forests, and then a convenient shipping method to markets throughout the West. By 1908, the American Lumber Company was reportedly the largest lumbering enterprise in the Southwest. It was comprised of sawmills, a box factory, and a sash and door factory, large holding ponds for unprocessed logs, and its own electric plant. . . . Thirty to forty carloads of logs were shipped from the plant every day and as much as fifty million board-feet of finished lumber were produced per year. Within three years of opening its mill, the company employed more than 850 people.16
For a long while the American Lumber Company was Albuquerque’s most financially significant enterprise after the Locomotive Repair Shops. American Lumber was the city’s second largest employer until 1914, when it first ran into financial difficulty. After going through several reorganizations and name changes, the much reduced lumber company, finally closed its doors in 1942.17 There were many other, smaller manufacturing businesses and wholesale distribution companies that also relied on AT&SF track and rolling stock beginning as early as the 1880s and proliferating in the twentieth century.
During the first two decades of the 1900s, the number of visitors to Albuquerque surged, in significant part because of promotional activities undertaken by AT&SF and the Fred Harvey Company, which served as the hotel and restaurant concessionaire for the railroad. In 1902, the Santa Fe built the mission-style Alvarado Hotel, the system’s largest hotel, as well as an Indian Curio Building and a new passenger depot at the north end of the Albuquerque rail yard complex.18 It was the exoticism of Pueblo and Hispanic customs and arts, the ruins of ancient ancestral Puebloan “apartment-towns,” and New Mexico’s chiseled and colorful landforms that drew increasing numbers of tourists, who came mostly by rail. In contrast, only a half mile south along the tracks from the AT&SF depot and the Harvey Indian Curio Building stood the Locomotive Repair Shops, the sprawling, towering, busy epitome of the “modern” Machine Age.
Figure 9.1. Postcard depicting the American Lumber Company complex in northwest Albuquerque, ca. 1908. Authors’ collection.
Figure 9.2. Architectural drawing of the north and east elevations of the AT&SF’s Alvarado Hotel in Albuquerque located just north of the AT&SF depot, made in preparation for enlargement of the hotel, 1932. E. A. Harrison, architect for AT&SF. Courtesy of the Kansas State Historical Society. DaRT ID: 57312.
The early years of the twentieth century saw Albuquerque emerge as a destination for the treatment of tuberculosis because of its high, dry, and temperate climate. Because of that “several sanatoriums were erected in the sand hills east of the railroad.” Among them were St. Joseph’s Sanatorium, established by the Sisters of Charity in 1902, and the Southwestern Presbyterian Sanatorium, which opened its doors in 1908. Patients at Presbyterian included [future senator] Clinton P. Anderson, who by 1919 was working as a journalist for the Albuquerque Morning Journal.19
The population continued to grow as people from other areas of the country moved West. As historian Erna Ferguson remembers, “By the turn of the [twentieth] century, . . . The railroad payroll kept the wheels turning. Trade by rail was just as profitable as trade by wagon, and men found work along the tracks and in the shops. Irishmen and Italians had swelled and enlivened the body politic.”20
To accommodate single shopmen, by 1919 at least thirteen apartment buildings and boarding houses were in operation in Albuquerque in the vicinity of the Shops. For much the same reason, there were at least fourteen restaurants and lunchrooms offering daily meals within easy walking distance of the shops. Many employees with families owned their residences. For example, the 1919 city directory lists the top management at the Shops as David E. Barton, superintendent of shops; John P. McMurray, master mechanic; Charles F. Stucke, general shop foreman; Aubrey B. Wachter, storekeeper; Martin T. Murphy, chief clerk at the supply depot; and Ralph P. Brown, electrical foreman. Of these six managers, four lived in their own residences, suggesting that they probably had families. The remaining two, Wachter and Brown, rented rooms indicating that, like many other shopmen—especially apprentices and helpers—they were single.21
The following excerpt from the “Railroads and Shops” column in the October 15, 1903, issue of the Albuquerque Morning Journal provides a glimpse of typical happenings in the Shops during the early twentieth century: “Both dynamos [electric generators] were running yesterday for the first time since the fire [evidently referring to the fire mentioned earlier that destroyed the machine shop’s roof]. Heretofore the machinery throughout the shops has only been operated by one dynamo, but since the other one has been repaired the motive power has doubled.
Figure 9.3. Photo of the Red Ball Café on 4th Street SW in Albuquerque, date unknown, 1922 or later. Located three blocks southwest of the west gate of the Shops, it has long sold Wimpy burgers. Photographer, unknown. Courtesy of the National Hispanic Cultural Center, Library/Archive, photo #501, Box 2, Folder 3.
The car repairing yards have been showing a remarkably clean appearance for the past few days. The force have been working hard for the past month in order to clean up with the back work, in order to have a few days vacation during the week [of the territorial fair].
All the shop employes [sic] will have a day off today. The entire shops will be shut down, except the portions of the roundhouse, which are on constant duty.
A. Rumberg, who has recently been promoted to boss of the machine shops, met with quite a painful accident yesterday, from which he will be laid up for several days. Mr. Rumberg, while carrying a driving box [an iron or steel casting that holds a brass or bearing for a drive axle], accidentally let it drop on his feet, completely mashing a toe on his right foot. He will not be able to return to work for a week or more.
Engine 822, which was damaged in a recent wreck, was turned out of the back shops yesterday, after a thorough overhauling. The engine will take a trial run to Isleta and back today.22
Those were some of the ordinary, daily, local challenges, but wide-scale difficulties could also affect all customers and employees of the Santa Fe. The year 1905, for instance, “was remarkable for excessive rainfall not confined to any one locality, but almost universal and nearly continuous. . . . On at least three occasions your [referring to the stockholders] main lines in Arizona and New Mexico were totally disabled for from four to eight days, besides innumerable smaller breaks. For weeks it was necessary to advise intending patrons to ship or travel by other routes. . . . The cost of repairing the damages caused by the floods will amount to $2,000,000.”23 Such interruptions of service necessarily also blocked the delivery of parts, lubricants, and raw materials to the Albuquerque Locomotive Repair Shops, putting a crimp in the overhaul schedule.