CHAPTER 13
By 1950, the buzz throughout the railroad industry was about the retirement of steam locomotive fleets and the complete conversion to the use of diesel-electric locomotives. Steam locomotives were rapidly being taken out of service and put into storage or scrapped. Data from the annual reports submitted to the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) by the AT&SF reveal the rapid and dramatic shift that occurred between 1949 and 1955. As of January 1, 1949, the Santa Fe owned 1,372 steam locomotives and 644 diesels. But by January 1955, the number of steam locomotives had plummeted to just 134, a decline of 90 percent. Meanwhile, the number of Santa Fe diesels had jumped to 1,618, an increase of 151 percent.1
Historian Tom Morrison recently wrote, “The real massacre of the [national] steam locomotive fleet gathered momentum in 1951 to satisfy a national need for scrap metal, partly to build new locomotives and rolling stock, partly to provide munitions for the Korean War.”2 That jibes with our own research on the AT&SF, which began aggressively scrapping steam locomotives in 1949. There were, nevertheless, some Santa Fe steam locomotives repaired at the Albuquerque Shops for use in transporting troops and materiel during the Korean War years of the early 1950s.3 In any case, the steady decline of numbers of AT&SF steam locomotives meant progressive layoffs of shopworkers at Albuquerque.
The AT&SF was no Johnny-come-lately to dieselization. On the contrary, the Santa Fe had been in the forefront of development of diesel-electric locomotives since the 1920s. As early as 1880, Santa Fe engineers submitted detailed locomotive specifications with their orders to manufacturers. By 1912, however, the company’s mechanical engineering department in Topeka was fully responsible for the design of the company’s steam locomotives. Those designs, along with “complete sets of specifications and drawings,” were then sent to the manufacturers for fabrication.4 The Santa Fe’s longtime chief mechanical engineer Charles Ripley has been especially recognized for his “unsung contributions and achievements in both steam locomotive and Diesel locomotive development [which] were substantial in the heady days leading up to the transition from steam to Diesel locomotives” on the AT&SF.5
Table 13.1. AT&SF Number of Steam and Diesel Locomotives, 1949–1955*
*Data from the annual reports submitted to the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) by the AT&SF.
Design and development of the diesel engine continued into the 1930s. “The first diesel freight locomotive was delivered to the Santa Fe for road tests in February 1938. . . . its performance encouraged the Santa Fe to place the first order for freight diesels by any railroad in the United States.” The years of the Second World War made it “clear that diesels had prevailed over steam by every measure of efficiency.”6 With the end of the War, the AT&SF committed itself to a systemwide conversion to diesel power. Over the next decade, the Santa Fe rapidly made the switch, adding nearly two hundred diesel locomotives to its fleet per year for several years. “In August 1957 after eighty-eight eventful years [as a company], all steam operations ended on the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway.”7
Although not perfect machines, diesel-electric locomotives had many virtues that recommended them to railroad businesses over steam locomotives. Diesels used significantly less fuel to haul the same loads; they didn’t have to stop for water every hundred miles or so; maintenance and repair costs of diesels amounted to no more than half of what they were for steam engines; and, most important, diesels required a smaller workforce both to run them and to repair them. Because diesel-electric locomotives operated with less mechanical wear and tear than did steam locomotives, their shop visits for repair and overhaul could be scheduled at longer intervals. Railroads could recoup the purchase price of diesels more quickly than the price of their steam-powered cousins.8 All in all, railroad balance sheets made it clear which type of motive power would make the most money: diesel.
The combination of lengthened intervals between overhauls for diesels and the large-scale standardization of diesel replacement parts meant that railroads needed fewer skilled machinists and other shopmen. It was no longer necessary for machinists to fabricate replacement parts from scratch. The know-how and mastery needed to rebuild a powerful steam locomotive from the ground up was now largely superfluous. As a consequence, between 1949 and 1955 the number of machinists employed by AT&SF fell 18 percent, from 2,222 to 1,818. Santa Fe boilermakers experienced an even more dramatic decline in employment of 59 percent, from 514 in 1949 to 210 in 1955. The skilled labor that had made trains the nation’s dominant mode of transportation and haulage for eighty years was in short order not valued as it had been. As has happened so often over time, professions that had seemed steady and secure suddenly were not. Like tailors, general blacksmiths, harness makers, telephone operators, stenographers, check-out clerks, elevator operators, and a host of other once common professions, skilled steam railroad shopmen were threatened with extinction.
The Albuquerque City Directory for 1950 lists 1,322 employees of the Locomotive Repair Shops, down modestly from the war years high.9 But steam locomotives were already then being taken out of service and placed in storage around the country, and a corresponding downward slide in the size of the workforce of shopmen in Albuquerque was not long in becoming apparent. It was in early 1954 when it became unmistakable that the skilled workforce was in for significant downsizing and that the Shops themselves had a very limited future life expectancy. The first official bad news for Shop employees came on January 8, 1954, with a very small note on the front page of the Albuquerque Journal. It states simply, “The Santa Fe Railway’s conversion to diesel power here has resulted in the layoff of 22 men in the roundhouse and back shops, officials said Thursday.”10 About a month and a half later, C. R. Tucker, the Santa Fe’s vice president for operations, was in Albuquerque, along with seven other company officials. Undoubtedly the most eventful news of their visit was that “complete change to Diesel power from steam locomotives would bring a reduction of about 200 men [at the Shops]. But he said the transfer here of roadwork equipment shops would bring 100 men to this department in the building facilities vacated by the locomotive shops.” Tucker also tried to ease the coming financial shock to the city of Albuquerque by suggesting that the AT&SF-owned Alvarado Hotel might be enlarged, something that had previously been studied and rejected by the Railway.11
Figure 13.1. Newspaper ad for AT&SF’s new diesel locomotive fleet, 1953. Albuquerque Journal, September 16, 1953, p. 24.
Just a week later, on February 28, D. J. Everett, superintendent of the Shops, let it be known that “Albuquerque is the last Santa Fe shop equipped to make major repairs to steam engines. . . . We expect to have all steam power stored within the next few months. . . . Older type equipment is being sold for scrap or other use.”12 Another week, and more bad news: “The Santa Fe Railway shops here will lay off 70 more men today, making a total of 135 here in two weeks.”13 And still the retirement of steam engines continued relentlessly. In January 1955, it was said that “almost all of the Santa Fe’s once extensive stable of fine steam locomotives, supreme or not, was retired or ‘Laid Up Good.’”14 By the final months of 1957, the payroll at the Shops was down to between 600 and 700 workers.15 Because of the continuing decline in steam locomotive numbers and the corresponding shrinkage of the Repair Shops workforce, AT&SF officials felt obliged to try to calm jitters among the remaining employees. A spokesman announced in 1958 that “he does not know of any plans for moving the railroad’s shops out of Albuquerque.”16
One of the Albuquerque shopmen caught up in the flux of the dieselization layoffs during 1952 or 1953 was Thomas Cordova, who we saw earlier had first hired on with the Santa Fe in 1927 as a boilermaker apprentice. Thomas was devastated and out of work for several months after the layoff. He was fortunate enough to eventually find another job as a welder at a Public Service Company of New Mexico (electric utility) power plant construction site. In 1954, he was called back to work at the Santa Fe Shops. But that didn’t last; he was laid off from the Shops a second time in 1958. Once again he got a construction job. After a few months, Thomas again rejoined the workforce at the Albuquerque Repair Shops. Now continuing work as a welder, he was an employee at the Shops until he retired in 1976. According to him, the railroad pension he received was very good, and he got medical care at the Santa Fe Hospital in Albuquerque.17
Other shopmen confronted by the dieselization layoffs decided to leave Albuquerque in order to pursue technical careers in places where opportunities for machinists and engineers were booming. Such were the cases of brothers-in-law Ernesto Shaw and Jesse Trujillo. Both Ernesto’s father, Bonifacio Shaw, and grandfather, George Shaw, had worked for the railroad, and his dad, a machinist, had helped him get a job at the Albuquerque Repair Shops. But when layoffs began on the Santa Fe as a result of the shift to diesel power, Ernesto migrated to Southern California, where he got a job in the burgeoning aerospace industry.18
Santa Fe shopmen like Thomas Cordova and Ernesto Shaw were not the only people whose lives were convulsed by the railroad’s conversion to diesel power. Some skeptics about wholesale dieselization argued fiercely that abandoning steam power altogether would prove to be a grave misstep, endangering the country. In that camp, some were convinced that the nation would soon exhaust its in-the-ground supply of petroleum fuel.19 That would, according to the critics, leave the country without rail transport if the complete abandonment of steam power went on in the 1950s as planned.
Other critics, attuned to the recent worldwide catastrophe of war, suggested that to avoid being caught with too few locomotives in the event that World War III were to break out, a considerable fleet of steam locomotives should be stored and kept at the ready. An article from 1950 argues that an emergency reserve fleet of 10,000 to 15,000 steam locomotives should be stationed strategically around the country and that a group of “heavy repair shops,” like the one at Albuquerque, should be perpetually on standby to keep those locomotives running, if need be. “Ten modern regional shops, working 24 hours a day, could turn out perhaps 500 Class 2 repairs a month, and in 20 to 30 months all 10 or 15 thousand ‘reserve’ steam units could be rebuilt.”20
Only over time did both of these worries subside. In the meantime, railroads such as the Santa Fe did, indeed, mothball steam locomotives at locations along their rail networks so that they could be returned to active service at times of peak demand or in emergencies. The Santa Fe had stored 164 steam locomotives by the end of February 1954, including 16 at the Albuquerque Shops.21 And, indeed, in late spring 1955, the AT&SF did bring a handful of steam locomotives out of storage at Albuquerque and put them temporarily to work again. “A group of 50-year-old steam locomotives, which were retired last year by the Santa Fe Railway in favor of modern diesel engines, are being taken out of mothballs this week at the Santa Fe shops here [in Albuquerque]. . . . The locomotives, with a new coat of shiny black paint, will be used temporarily between Clovis [NM] and Amarillo [TX].” The contingent of newly overhauled and refurbished steam locomotives comprised less than twenty engines. They were to substitute for diesels that had been sent to California to help handle an especially large potato harvest there.22
Barring some catastrophic emergency, though, the system of maintaining a fleet of steam locomotives in reserve was doomed to abandonment from the first. No railroad would long shoulder the increasingly impractical financial burden of keeping hundreds of steam locomotives off the rails, but yet ready to roll at short notice. Eventually, nearly all the steam engines were scrapped, with a few held onto doggedly as emblems of their past pivotal role in the nation’s daily life. Within just a few years, knowledge of how to fabricate a locomotive boiler or time the valves on massive steam cylinders or inspect a crosshead was mostly lost or forgotten. A whole suite of professions simply disappeared from the employment repertoire. Neighborhoods like Barelas and South Broadway slipped toward decline. And towns and cities like Albuquerque reeled from the economic blow for several years and then, if they were lucky, gradually shifted to other lines of work.
For Albuquerque, a “dramatic post-war upsurge [in population] ignited an economic revival for light industrial firms, small manufacturers, and wholesale distribution companies, as well as commercial businesses. In addition, the city experienced a major increase in the tourism industry during the 1950s as a result of national prosperity, improved highways . . . and America’s continued love affair with the automobile. This economic revitalization came despite the significant loss of railroad jobs as the AT&SF retired its fleet of steam locomotives.”23 Kirtland Air Force Base and Sandia Base (which became Sandia National Laboratories) were already major employers during the War years and continued to grow, as what President Eisenhower labeled “the military-industrial complex” became and then remained a pivotal driver of the national economy. Federal government agencies, such as the Bureau of Land Management, the National Forest Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the Atomic Energy Commission (which passed through a number of organizational changes ultimately within the Department of Energy), and corresponding state agencies burgeoned. Outside of governmental entities, businesses engaged in commercial oil and gas exploration multiplied, with Albuquerque serving as a financial hub for much of that activity in New Mexico. The University of New Mexico became a substantial and eminent regional institution of higher education. It wasn’t many years before the glory days of the Albuquerque Locomotive Repair Shops were all but forgotten.
Although in 1954 the machine shop at the Albuquerque complex, according to the Shops’ superintendent, had “already [been] half converted to repair of the diesels,” that was not to be included in the Company’s final plans.24 Instead, the AT&SF designated two other already existing shops, at Cleburne, Texas, and San Bernardino, California, as its diesel repair shops. The Albuquerque Shops were relegated to the repair of track maintenance machinery under the designation “Centralized Work Equipment Shops.” The workforce still numbered between 600 and 700 at the end of 1957.25 But in 1977, when William Clarke retired as superintendent of the Albuquerque Centralized Work Equipment Shops and in 1983 when J. B. Hendrix retired as engineer there, the staff numbered only 173.26 That is about when the Centralized Shops in Albuquerque shut down operations. One man who was working as a machinist when the Centralized Shops closed for good remembered that the company gave just one day’s notice. When that day ended, many workers refused to believe that there would be no work the next day. So they showed up at the regular time the next day and found the gate chained and padlocked. That was the end.
“In August 1982, the roundhouse [had been] closed.”27 “The railroad maintained a presence on the property until they closed their doors and the property was sold to a development group in the early 1990s.”28 Then the Santa Fe merged with the Burlington Northern in 1995, to form the BNSF Railway, which is currently the largest freight railroad in North America. After the naming of the Centralized Work Equipment Shops, known to the company as “Shops #3,” in the 1950s, the full complex of buildings that had comprised the Albuquerque Locomotive Repair Shops was no longer useful as originally conceived. The electricity-generating powerhouse and its 230-foot-tall smokestack were torn down in 1984, and the roundhouse was demolished in 1987. The cab paint shop, the General Office Building, and other assorted smaller buildings were also taken down in the 1980s. The machine shop, boiler shop, paint shop, and blacksmith shop were all put to use as part of the Centralized Work Equipment Shops. Parts of those buildings, as well as some smaller buildings, also served as storage spaces.29
By the 1970s and 1980s, the residential neighborhoods surrounding what had been the Shops complex, particularly Barelas and South Broadway, were being abandoned, a little more each year. Those neighborhoods, though, during the War and into the 1950s, had been aging but solidly middle-class areas. Patrick Trujillo, who, in the 1950s, spent time on South Arno Street in the South Broadway neighborhood with his grandparents—his grandfather was a machinist at the Shops—remembered the environs as dominantly Hispanic, very tidy, and well maintained, fences neatly painted, yards planted with flowers.30
Table 13.2. Ethnicity (Surname Proxy) of AT&SF Employees Living on South 3rd Street and South Broadway in Albuquerque, 1896, 1919, and 1950. Data from City Directories for those Years
The Hispanization over time of AT&SF employees living in both the Barelas and South Broadway neighborhoods is obvious from our tabulation of families listed by surname in city directories for three different years during operation of the Repair Shops: 1896, 1919, and 1950. The percentage of Spanish-surnamed and non-Spanish-surnamed households on South 3rd Street in Barelas in 1896 was 0 percent Hispanic and 100 percent non-Hispanic, but in 1950 the percentages had almost reversed: 85.4 percent Hispanic and 14.5 percent non-Hispanic. The results are similar for South Broadway, a neighborhood where most people worked at the Shops and made living wages.
After the radical downsizing of the payroll at the Albuquerque Repair Shops in the 1950s, alternative employment and new shopping and residential areas elsewhere in the city—especially on the East Mesa—encouraged a steady outflow of people from the neighborhoods surrounding the rail yards. As we have already seen, there was also significant out-migration from the city as a whole. By the 1960s, “dense neighborhoods north and south of the [central business district, including Barelas and South Broadway] were beginning to look less well kept than in years past” and “shabbiness had slowly given way to dilapidation.”31 There were increasing numbers of derelict and empty houses. Urban renewal efforts of the 1970s, which were never brought to fulfillment, resulted in the tearing down of many houses, leaving empty lots, some of which have yet to be rebuilt upon. A major exception to that trend has been the establishment of the National Hispanic Cultural Center, which opened on a twenty-acre campus within the Barelas neighborhood in 2000.