Chapter 11
When the original Albuquerque Locomotive Repair Shops were built in 1880 and 1881, steam locomotives were tiny compared to the behemoths that would run the rails in the 1930s and 1940s. They hauled light loads mostly over the easy terrain of plains and broad river valleys of the East and Midwest.
It was clear, when transcontinental railroads were first envisioned, that much more powerful locomotives would be required to negotiate the broken and mountainous West. Then, when railroad transportation became the norm after the Civil War, and much greater loads of passengers and freight were beginning to move by rail, the need for hugely increased locomotive power became imperative for a booming railroad industry.
The Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad/Railway was no passive purchaser of super locomotive power. It was a leader in the engineering, design, and manufacture of the mammoth steam locomotives that hauled a significant share of the nation’s goods and passengers throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Already in 1880, under the impetus of its chief mechanical engineer, AT&SF purchased the first locomotives built to the company’s own specifications from the Baldwin Locomotive Works of Philadelphia. In 1901, the railroad began using 2–10–2 locomotives (i.e., with two small front pilot wheels, ten large drive wheels, and two small trailing truck wheels)—known appropriately as the “Santa Fe Type”—built in its own Topeka shops.1
Each new generation (or class) of locomotives, produced in almost as rapid succession as cell phones are today, was bigger, heavier, and more powerful than its predecessor. Each new class carried more fuel and water, had a bigger firebox and bigger boiler, and consequently could pull more weight (its tractive power). As just one indication of that trend, in 1890 the average steam locomotive weighed 92,000 pounds; just ten years later the average was 120,000 pounds.2 The accompanying table compares a selected group of five classes of AT&SF steam locomotives manufactured between 1887 and 1937. Note especially that the length of the locomotives (without tenders) approximately doubled over that fifty-year period, from 33.9 feet to 67.2 feet. An obvious consequence of that mushrooming size was that the locomotives outgrew the company’s repair shops, including the shops at Albuquerque.
That trend in locomotive size came as no surprise to AT&SF because it was in large measure driven and realized by its own mechanical engineering staff. The handwriting was on the company’s drafting tables, so to speak. The trajectory of locomotive size was clear from at least the early 1900s, as were the rapidly increasing volume of railroad traffic across the Southwest and the swelling number of locomotives in the AT&SF fleet. The Santa Fe owned 839 steam locomotives in 1896. By 1905, that number had grown to 1,454, a nearly 75 percent increase, and by 1915, the fleet numbered 2,105, a jump of about another 45 percent.3 By the middle 1910s, the combination of the steadily growing size of steam locomotives and their multiplying numbers left the Albuquerque Repair Shops painfully small to handle the necessary work of keeping AT&SF’s motive power in working order, on which the company’s business was utterly dependent. As the industry journal Railway Age stated in 1922, “It became apparent several years ago that this layout had become inadequate and consideration was given to the construction of entirely new facilities. The studies made at that time indicated that the best arrangement would be secured by constructing the new facilities on the present location. To that end, additional land was acquired in 1913.”4
Table 11.1. Selected AT&SF Locomotives Compared by Size and Power
Source: AT&SF Railway, “Steam Engine Diagrams and Blueprints,” Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Collection, Railroad, Box 535, Folder 2, Item No. 221763, Kansas State Historical Society.
Figure 11.1. Crew of African American mule drivers, “Grading for the Great New Shops in Albuquerque.” This photo shows part of the equipment of the Springer Transfer Company preparing the ground for the erection of additional shop facilities at Albuquerque. Although the quality of this reproduction is poor, the photograph provides a rare record of African American workers during building of the new Shops. Note the blacksmith shop in the upper right background. Santa Fe Magazine 9, no. 11 (October 1915): 44.
Construction of the enlarged and modernized shop buildings got underway in 1914. The original boiler and blacksmith shops and other smaller buildings south of the transfer table were demolished, and the land was cleared and leveled, a job performed mostly by African American laborers using mule-drawn graders and other equipment. Contractors then built a new carpenter shop and a much ballyhooed and admired storehouse (now the home of the WHEELS Museum), both built of reinforced concrete, as well as three brick lavatories and two wood-frame buildings—a coaling chute and a car repair shed.
Figure 11.2. Albuquerque, New Mexico. Part of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad store department (storehouse) built in 1915. More than 35,000 different items were carried here. Note banks of high windows and sloped shelving with cubbies for individual items, 1943. Photograph by Jack Delano, National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, 2014, Figure 9.
It is worth pointing out some of the innovative features of the new storehouse. In 1915, Aubrey Wachter, then AT&SF’s southwest division storekeeper, boasted that the brand new storehouse was “probably today unsurpassed by any railway supply depot in this country.”5 The one-story, reinforced concrete building still shows its original footprint: indoor storage and office space of 409 feet x 50 feet, with additional outdoor storage on a concrete platform 800 feet x 70 feet, with deck height matching the standard deck height of railroad boxcars and flatcars. A continuous rank of large windows runs down each wall at a height of 11 feet above the floor, resulting in an extraordinarily well-lighted workspace. This attention to abundant natural lighting is a hallmark of all the new buildings in the shop complex.
Within the main indoor storage space, a supply of small and especially costly parts was kept in four long files of wooden cabinets that ran lengthwise down the longest dimension of the building. Each individual cubby or drawer was labeled with a numeric code indicating the specific part or component contained in it. Spacious aisles between the rows of cabinets permitted easy access by hand trucks and carts. Likewise, outside on the platform the locations of larger parts were indicated by painted outlines on the concrete deck. In all, the new storehouse carried more than 35,000 items.6 Efficiency in storing and locating those items was the watchword that governed the building’s design.
A variety of petroleum products—primarily assorted oils and greases—and varnishes were stored within fireproof rooms in the basement. Twenty-six self-measuring pumps dispensed these liquids to workers within an oil house portion of the storehouse. New supplies of these heavy, messy, and essential substances were delivered by a gantry crane through an opening in the oil house roof. Gasoline and other flammables were stored in another area of the complex and delivered by pipe to the storehouse.7 To show off this new facility, the company convened a systemwide meeting of about 150 store employees at the Albuquerque Shops, September 27–29, 1915, something never before attempted by the company.8
AT&SF track crews also realigned the rails serving the Albuquerque Shops in keeping with what would eventually be the layout of the new complex. Issues of the Santa Fe Magazine for employees also recorded other renovation and expansion work undertaken within the shop complex during late 1914 and 1915: a new planing mill with a band saw for ripping and resawing boards and a planing waste exhaust system, a wheel shop, an additional lavatory with locker room, a tie-treating plant, and a new electrical generating plant.9
Figure 11.3. “Group photo of attendees at the first meeting of the storekeepers of the entire Santa Fe System, September 27–29, 1915.” Storekeepers are posed on the steps to the north entrance of the brand new storehouse at the Albuquerque Shops, currently WHEELS Museum. Photographer unknown. Santa Fe Magazine 9, no. 11 (October 1915): 40.
At that point, though, the need for coordinated nationwide transportation occasioned by the large-scale fighting of World War I interrupted business plans for the AT&SF and many other American companies. Despite the drop in railroad revenues that followed, in 1917 the AT&SF put together the funds to erect a new blacksmith shop at Albuquerque built of brick and steel. The new shop was a spacious 80 feet x 306 feet, housing “three steam hammers and heavy duty blowers to power the forges for annealing metal parts. Old driving wheels and other scrap metal were re-forged on-site.”10 The new blacksmith shop still stands and is now home to the Rail Yards Market.
As we have already seen, at the end of 1917, President Wilson ordered nationalization of the railroads, placing control of most aspects of the operation of all railroads under the United States Railroad Administration (USRA). Nationalization and the subsequent diversion of construction resources to projects directly related to the war effort interrupted further work on the new Albuquerque Shops. With the end of World War I in late 1918, however, railroad companies immediately pressed for early restoration of full private control of all aspects of the rail industry. In anticipation of that eventuality, in 1919, AT&SF entered into a contract with J. E. Nelson and Sons of Chicago to build a new machine-shop building at Albuquerque, which would cost some $3 million.11 The USRA was abolished in April 1920 and railway companies, including AT&SF, were compensated for their depressed income during the years of the USRA’s existence.
Figure 11.4. North façade of the new blacksmith shop, built in 1914. Currently called The Yards, home to a seasonal growers’ market, 2020. Photo by the authors.
Figure 11.5. Interior of new blacksmith shop at the Albuquerque Repair Shops, with power hammers, 1948. Note large window area on long (east and west) walls. Photograph by Barnes & Caplin. Courtesy of the Albuquerque Museum, Photo Archives, catalog number PA1980-184-907.
The AT&SF pushed forward immediately with its plans to enlarge and modernize the Albuquerque Shops. On November 1, 1920, Nelson and Sons began construction of the new machine shop, and building of new flue and babbit shops had started two months earlier.12 “The decade from 1914 to 1924, when . . . new Albuquerque shops were constructed [to replace the 1880s buildings], coincided with the greatest period of innovation in the history of industrial design and building technology.”13 As a result, the machine-shop, boiler-shop, and flueshop buildings, akin to the contemporaneous Ford Motor Company’s “Glass Plant” at its River Rouge, Michigan, complex, represented the state of American industrial architecture, featuring glass-curtain walls and skylights, supported by a stunning steel framework and enclosing a huge, airy, open workspace. The interior organization of the various Albuquerque Shop buildings was also certainly influenced by studies such as that carried out by Harrington Emerson from 1904 to 1907 at AT&SF’s Topeka Shops. His principles of efficiency became a guide for many other shops as well.14
The new buildings marked a wholesale departure from earlier norms of American industrial architecture, which relied on stone masonry walls and wood-frame roof structures. The new steel girder framework permitted both quicker erection of the buildings and the incorporation within them of much wider roof spans that enclosed huge work floors. When completed, the three-and-a-half-acre machine shop, for instance, could accommodate as many as twenty-six steam locomotives simultaneously, a larger capacity than the AT&SF’s principal shops in Topeka, Kansas.15
Figure 11.6. New machine shop under construction, showing steel girder framework and peaked framing for one of many skylights, 1922. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of Center for Southwest Research, University Libraries, University of New Mexico; Albuquerque Construction Sites Album, 1919-1923, PICT 2002-013-0002c.
Figure 11.7. Interior of the erecting bay of the machine shop at the Albuquerque Locomotive Repair Shops, showing north steel and glass curtain wall, 2014. Note inspection pit in center foreground. Photograph by Petra Morris, National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, 2014, number 0005 of 0052.
By the end of August 1921, glaziers were already installing the thousands of 14 x 20 inch panes of special ribbed glass manufactured by the Streator Glass Company.16 These formed the long northern and southern walls of the machine shop and were its “most noteworthy feature,” one that is still the most arresting aspect of the building.17 Essential to the operation of the machine shop, which had to be capable of moving locomotive parts weighing many tons, was the 256-ton overhead traveling crane, as well as five other, smaller-capacity overhead cranes. The cranes’ rails and supporting armatures were part of the building’s steel scaffolding. The floor, too, was innovative. It looked like it was brick, but, in fact, was made of creosoted wood blocks laid on a concrete slab. This floor system was more comfortable to stand and walk on than concrete alone, helped suppress the clatter of dropped parts and tools, and reduced the likelihood of sparks from falling metal objects. Each locomotive bay was defined and provided ingress and egress by a short stub of track and a central, longitudinal, concrete service pit, giving ready access to each locomotive’s underside.18
The floor plan of the machine-shop building, huge for its day, was divided into four parallel bays, each with a rectangular footprint with the long axis oriented east-west. The largest and most northerly of the four spaces was the erecting bay, where the major work of disassembling and reassembling steam locomotives took place. The dimensions of its floor space were 600 feet x 90 feet, and it had a usable vertical space of 57 feet. This is where the twenty-six concrete service pits—each 63 feet long—and the 250-ton crane were located, as well as two 15-ton overhead traveling cranes.
At any given time, the erecting bay would house multiple locomotives in various stages of overhaul, plus equipment necessary for breaking down and reassembling those complex machines, including “fifteen engine lathes; a car-wheel lathe; a double-head car axle lathe; two vertical and one horizontal turret lathes; one 100-inch boring mill and four smaller mills; five radial drill presses; one double-head and five single-head shapers; three slotters, one piston-rod and one guide grinder; three double-head dry grinders and two single wet-tool grinders; and other smaller machine tools.”19 In addition, there were multiple hand trucks, carts, jacks, ladders, and assorted wrenches, punches, hammers, chisels, snips, saws, files, clamps, bearing pullers, welding torches, and other hand tools. The net affect was that, despite the cavernous size of the space, it often felt like the machinists, apprentices, helpers, welders, sheet metal workers, pipefitters, electricians, and inspectors had barely enough room to move around.
Figure 11.8. Arrival of mammoth girders to hold 256-ton traveling crane in the erecting bay of the machine shop at Albuquerque, 1922. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of Center for Southwest Research, University Libraries, University of New Mexico; Albuquerque Construction Sites Album, 1919-1923, PICT 2002-013-0041e.
Figure 11.9. Floor area of new machine shop at Albuquerque, with concrete-lined inspection pits recently finished. Old machine shop and new blacksmith shop in background, 1922. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of Center for Southwest Research, University Libraries, University of New Mexico; Albuquerque Construction Sites Album, 1919-1923, PICT 2002-013-0007a.
Figure 11.10. Floor plan of the new machine shop at Albuquerque, with the various bays labeled, 1932. E. A. Harrison, architect for AT&SF, National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, 2014, Figure 14.
Within the machine shop, immediately south of the erecting bay was the heavy machinery bay, a space 600 feet long and 65 feet wide. Here is where locomotive wheels could be resurfaced and balanced and where steam cylinders and their corresponding pistons, as well as the various drive rods and tie rods could be reconditioned. The heavy machinery bay was also equipped with two 15-ton overhead traveling cranes and numerous jib cranes affixed to structural columns, as well as an array of machine and hand tools paralleling those in use in the erecting bay. With a ceiling height only 60 percent of that in the erecting bay, the heavy machinery bay still felt spacious even when the floor area was thick with massive drive wheels and rods. Part of this bay was occupied by a locked 50 feet x 20 feet hand-tool room, from which workers had to check out the tools they needed.
Figure 11.11. Wheels in heavy machine bay of the Albuquerque machine shop, 1943. Note the haziness—fine particles of metal and grinding dust produced by such operations as welding—that was typical of the air in the machine shop. Photograph by Jack Delano. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, catalog number LC fsa 8d27208.
The next subdivision of the machine shop to the south of the heavy machinery bay was the smaller-still light machinery bay, at 540 feet long and 40 feet wide, with a 20-foot ceiling height. Here parts such as light rods and levers, pilots (cowcatchers), couplings, brake parts, cable guides, whistles, bells, headlights, automatic oilers, and other smaller locomotive parts were cleaned and repaired. Again, this bay boasted a 5-ton monorail crane and many jib cranes, and it was supplied with grinders, buffers, compressed air hoses, and flexible wire brushes, together with pliers, light hammers, screw drivers, drills, files, and myriad other small machine and hand tools.
The fourth and final bay within the machine shop was the bench bay, the same size as the light machinery bay. But more of its space was occupied by small storage rooms, a blueprint room, and the general foreman’s office. The repair work done here focused on small pieces of equipment, such things as gears and gauges, which often had to be held steadily in place on a flat surface or required intense light or magnification to permit manipulation of extremely small components such as washers, springs, escapements, clutches, and so on.
Even in the face of the rising possibility of a shopmen’s strike, on June 9, 1922, the company announced the award of a contract to C. A. Fellows Construction Company of Los Angeles to tear down the old machine shop to make way for a new boiler shop. Fellows also built all the remaining buildings of the new shop complex, except the machine shop.20 Less than a month later, on July 1, a thousand shopmen went on strike in Albuquerque, but that hardly seemed to put a pause on the construction work. Demolition of the old machine shop and preparation of the site were nearly complete by September 20, when it was reported that “a few of the men who went on strike with the shopmen’s union on July 1 are applying for employment in the Santa Fe shops. . . . However, there has not been a large or general application for re-employment. [An] official said that the shops and roundhouse now have ninety percent of a normal [work]force.”21
In passing, the Morning Journal also reported that a dining hall “for the accommodation of the men who reside on the premises,” referring to strike-breaking replacement workers, had “recently been erected,” which would “be used for shop purposes when strike conditions are out of the way.”22 In Albuquerque, as in much of the rest of the nation, the strike would effectively be over very soon. The signing of the CB&Q contract and the issuance of a nationwide injunction against the strike (discussed earlier) both occurred that same month, signaling the futility of continuing the strike. That did not end the bitterness between the AT&SF and many of its former and retained or rehired shopmen, but work on the new Albuquerque Shops now went barreling ahead.
The new boiler shop, a smaller look-alike of the new machine shop, was sited parallel to and just north across the transfer table on the site of the old machine shop. Like its larger mate, the boiler shop had long glass-curtain walls on its north and south sides, and a wide, high-ceilinged workspace bounded by a framework of steel girders. The boiler shop was erected during 1923, completing the core of the new Locomotive Repair Shops. The company was active in the design of all the new buildings: “The Albuquerque shops’ steel buildings were designed by an in-house AT&SF design team led by C. F. W. Felt, Chief Engineer; E. A. Harrison, Chief Architect; and A. F. Robinson, the company’s Bridge Engineer.”23
The completed Locomotive Shops occupied the northern portion of a nearly level, roughly twenty-seven-acre site south of modern downtown Albuquerque between 2nd Street and the original main line of the AT&SF tracks and between Atlantic Avenue and Cromwell Avenue SW. When the repair and overhaul facility was fully enlarged and renovated by 1925, the shop complex was comprised of more than twenty-five distinct buildings, each serving a different purpose. The major buildings were the machine shop, boiler shop, blacksmith shop, tender repair shop, flue shop, cab paint shop, babbit shop, sheet metal house, wheel shop, storehouse, roundhouse and turntable, power plant, car repair shop, carpenter shop, planing mill, five lavatory buildings, locker rooms, fire station, administration building, and coal and sand towers. In addition, there was a tie treatment plant, as well as lime, cement, paint, gasoline, and arch brick storage buildings, and several sheds and smaller buildings. The entirety of the complex was interlaced by tracks and concrete fire access roads, as well as a system of eleven fire alarm boxes, including ones at the machine shop, in the middle yards, and in the lower yards.24 And all of the Shop buildings were linked together by gas, telephone, and electric lines, as well as steam and cold water pipes, and a sewer system. There was also a 600-foot-long transfer table located between the machine shop and the boiler shop. Its purpose was to move locomotives on an east-west axis, at a right angle to the main and subsidiary rail lines, into and out of the machine shop bays.
Figure 11.12. Tender of locomotive #3874 exiting the machine shop onto the transfer table, 1943. Operator’s cab half in shade. See figure 11.13 below. Photograph by Jack Delano. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, catalog number LC-fsa 8d15537.
Figure 11.13. Operator’s cab of the transfer table near western end of the track, 2020. Boiler shop to the left, machine shop to the right. Photo by the authors.
When completed in 1925, the Albuquerque Locomotive Repair Shops represented the state of the art in American industrial design. The Shops were also supplied with the most up-to-date machining and other technical equipment in the railroad industry. So much were the Albuquerque Shops seen as the model for modern steam locomotive repair and overhaul facilities that, with only slight modifications, the plan of the whole complex was duplicated at Cleburne, Texas, after the disastrous fire that destroyed most of the shops there in 1922.25
Figure 11.14. Cropped version of a site plan showing the layout of new [1920s] and old [1880s] buildings at the Albuquerque Locomotive Repair Shops complex. New buildings shown in heavy lines, “Santa Fe Completes Modern Shops at Albuquerque,” Railway Age 73, no. 6 (August 5, 1922): 238–39.
Figure 11.15. Machine shop at AT&SF’s repair shops in Cleburne, Texas, 1935–1945. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of the Kansas State Historical Society, DaRT ID: 51380.
As with the original arrival of the railroad in Albuquerque, building the new shops brought another influx of outsiders with special skills into town. Because both contractors hired to put up the new shops were based outside New Mexico, they brought to the job experienced employees and subcontractors. Thomas La Rue, for example, was a structural steel worker who came to work on the new boiler shop. He had previously lived in El Paso, from which he brought his wife and daughter for the time he was employed in work on the shop by V. E. Ware, also of El Paso. The little family rented a furnished room on the 400 block of Lead Avenue SW. We know about his employment and his family because of his suicide just after Christmas 1922. La Rue was reported to have suffered a “breakdown, as a result of worry over the work he was doing on the new Santa Fe boiler shops.”26 Four other steelworkers are shown with part of their names on a 1921 photograph of the ongoing erection of the steel framework of the machine shop: Sully, Charley, Mesey, and Barr. Other, apparently managerial, personnel appear or are referred to in other photos from the same album: Howard Weir, Bill, Fred, Van Ness, Tom [Thomas E.? assistant foreman of the Shops], Sadler, and Conklin, as well as a steam shovel operator named Roberts. Yet another photo in that album shows the on-site office of the general contractor J. E. Nelson & Sons.
Figure 11.16. On-site office of J.E. Nelson & Sons, the general contractor for building the “new” Albuquerque Shops during the early 1920s, 1922. View from the east, with new roundhouse in background. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of the Center for Southwest Research, University Libraries, University of New Mexico; Albuquerque Construction Sites Album, 1919–1923, PICT 2002-013-0013a.
Work on the new machine shop began in October 1920, and the shop was fully operational by June 1922. Building this huge state-of-the-art industrial facility took just twenty months from start to finish. That was one of the anticipated advantages to the company inherent in steel-and-glass-curtain-wall construction. It is worth noting that its completion came just weeks before the beginning of the 1922 Shopmen’s Strike.