The story
Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway
The railroad was chartered in February 1859 to serve the cities of Atchison and Topeka, Kansas, and Santa Fe, New Mexico. The railroad reached the Kansas–Colorado border in 1873 and Pueblo, Colorado, in 1876. To create a demand for its services, the railroad set up real estate offices and sold farmland from the land grants that it was awarded by Congress for laying track.
As the railroad was first being built, many of the tracks were laid directly over the wagon ruts of the Santa Fe Trail. In 1869, the first general office building of the company was built in Topeka. This building also served as a passenger station and freight depot. When the line was extended to Newton, Kansas in 1871, the railroad became a major cattle shipper to ensure a steady revenue stream, at the end of Texas cattle drive trails.
Despite being chartered to serve the city, the railroad chose to bypass Santa Fe, due to the engineering challenges of the mountainous terrain. In 1880, a branch line from Lamy, New Mexico, brought the Santa Fe railroad the 20 miles to its namesake city. It continued to connect with the Southern Pacific at Deming.
The system was eventually expanded with branch lines into California, Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Illinois. It reached Arizona and California by acquiring control of the western portion of the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad in 1880. It reached Chicago by acquiring the Chicago and St. Louis Railway in 1887. By 1887 the mainline had been completed from Chicago to Los Angeles, making it one of the country’s most important railroads and one of the few that directly connected the Midwest with the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean under one corporation. The principal lines consisted of:
Chicago to Kansas City to La Junta, Colorado, to Los Angeles;
Emporia, Kansas, to Oklahoma City to Fort Worth to Houston;
Emporia, Kansas, to Dalies, New Mexico;
Barstow to Richmond, California (the Valley Division);
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Temple to Farwell, Texas;
Denver to La Junta, Colorado;
Albuquerque, New Mexico, to El Paso, Texas;
Dallas to Presidio, Texas; and
Kansas City to Tulsa.
The primary back shops at Topeka, Kansas, were first established in the 1860s. The original shops were relocated in 1878 to the south side of Seward Avenue and expanded in 1902 to double the repair capacity. The shops at Albuquerque, New Mexico, were built in 1880 and materially expanded in 1925. Another shop site was established at San Bernardino, California, in 1886. To maintain rolling stock in the state of Texas, a fourth major shop facility was built in Cleburne, Texas, in 1899.
Physical confrontations led to two years of armed conflict that became known as the Royal Gorge Railroad War. Federal intervention prompted an out-of-court settlement on February 2, 1880, in the form of the so-called "Treaty of Boston", wherein the Denver & Rio Grande railroad was allowed to complete its line and lease it for use by the Santa Fe railroad.
Building across Kansas and eastern Colorado was simple, with few natural obstacles, but the railroad found it almost economically impossible because of the sparse population. It set up real estate offices in the area and promoted settlement across Kansas on the land granted to it by Congress in 1863.
The Santa Fe entered Texas by starting what became the Panhandle and Santa Fe Railway in 1886 and acquiring the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway in 1887. The Santa Fe reached San Francisco by buying the San Francisco & San Joaquin Valley Railway in 1891. They completed a Grand Canyon branch in 1901. The Santa Fe acquired the properties of the Southern California Railway in 1906. They acquired a Phoenix branch with the purchase of the Santa Fe, Prescott and Phoenix Railway in 1911.
Expansion
In 1928, the Santa Fe acquired the Kansas City, Mexico and Orient Railway.
On March 29, 1955, the railway was one of many companies that sponsored attractions in Disneyland with its five-year sponsorship of all Disneyland trains and stations until 1974.
In 1960, AT&SF bought the Toledo, Peoria & Western Railroad (TP&W); then sold a half-interest to the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR). The TP&W cut straight east across Illinois from near Fort Madison, Iowa (Lomax, IL), to a connection with the PRR at Effner, Indiana (Illinois–Indiana border), forming a bypass around Chicago for traffic moving between the two lines. The TP&W route did not mesh with the traffic patterns Conrail developed after 1976, so AT&SF bought back the other half, merged the TP&W in 1983, then sold it back into independence in 1989.
Attempted Southern Pacific merger
AT&SF began merger talks in the 1980s. The Southern Pacific Santa Fe Railroad (SPSF) was a proposed merger between the parent companies of the Southern Pacific and AT&SF announced on December 23, 1983. As part of the joining of the two firms, all rail and non-rail assets owned by Santa Fe Industries and the Southern Pacific Transportation Company were placed under the control of a holding company, the Santa Fe–Southern Pacific Corporation. The merger was subsequently denied by the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) on the basis that it would create too many duplicate routes.
The companies were so confident the merger would be approved that they began repainting locomotives and non-revenue rolling stock in a new unified paint scheme. While Southern Pacific (railroad) was sold off to Rio Grande Industries, all of the SP's real estate holdings were consolidated into a new company, Catellus Development Corporation, making it California's largest private landowner, of which Santa Fe remained the owner. In the early 1980s, gold was discovered on several properties west of Battle Mountain, Nevada along I-80, on ground owned by the Santa Fe Railroad (formerly SP). The Santa Fe Pacific Corporation (a name correlation of Santa Fe and Southern Pacific) was to develop the properties. They were sold to Newmont during 1997 in preparation for the merger with Burlington Northern). Sometime later, Catellus would purchase the Union Pacific Railroad's interest in the Los Angeles Union Passenger Terminal (LAUPT).
Burlington Northern merger
On September 22, 1995, AT&SF merged with Burlington Northern Railroad to form the Burlington Northern & Santa Fe Railway (BNSF). Some of the challenges resulting from the joining of the two companies included the establishment of a common dispatching system, the unionization of AT&SF's non-union dispatchers, and incorporating AT&SF's train identification codes throughout. The two lines maintained separate operations until December 31, 1996, when it officially became BNSF.
Source: Santa Fe Railroad (1945), Along Your Way, Rand McNally, Chicago, Illinois.
From Wikipedia’s article on Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4