At dinner last night with Mom and Dad (Papa Felipe’s- our usual), we somehow got onto the topic of trains while we scarfed down our favorite New Mexican meals.

It was because Mom and Dad had had some guests in town the last week, and we had been talking about the events of their visit.

At one point, Dad shared that one of their friends liked a hat that my dad had sitting in the house- a hat he had got when he went downtown here in Albuquerque to see and support a project in action. A local non-profit was rebuilding an old Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe locomotive, Engine 2926.

My dad ended up giving the couple his hat, as his charity usually dictates, and after the conversation I went home thinking about old trains, train lines, and train life in the Midwest and Southwest.

Because trains probably have had a significant role in this place that I now live, Albuquerque. And because trains here emanated from there, Kansas, where my parents came from, and where some of my family still lives.

By blood and by history I am often reminded that here and there are linked many ways in my life, and as anyone curious about their past and their identity does, I find myself wanting to know more about the foreign but significant places and events that formed my family.

And the wannabe writer in me would love to find something interesting, local, and relatively unknown to right about.

So Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe… never made it to Santa Fe formally. Chartered to connect the Kansas towns to the New Mexico capitol city, economic interests ended up pulling the main line westward instead into Colorado to try and benefit from lead, silver, and coal mining in the area between Raton, New Mexico and Trinidad, Colorado. The line did a lot to help settlement of Kansas and Eastern Colorado.

ATSF (aka “Santa Fe”) wasn’t alone in its interest in the southern Colorado coal boon, though.

From the west, the Denver & Rio Grande Railway (aka “Rio Grande”), known for its high mountain narrow gauge lines bridging sites in the Rockies, pushed east from Denver to expand its interests into central Colorado and New Mexico- wanting to break south into the territory at the very place the Santa Fe was building its line east, at Raton Pass.

The two competing companies literally ran into each other in the Royal Gorge, which provoked conflict about right of way and escalated to spark verbal, and, in a short time, armed conflict between the two company camps.

The “Royal Gorge Railroad War” lasted for two years (1878-1880) before federal intervention brought about a settlement. The Denver company won rights to build on through into Raton Pass, but Santa Fe was given rights to use that line. And the D&RGR was granted freedom to build their line on through the Royal Gorge to head east. Santa Fe retained rights for the line headed south into New Mexico.

Of interest to me, related to my family, is the fact that the river running trough the Royal Gorge in Colorado is the same river that runs through the town my parent’s grew up in (Arkansas City, Kansas)- the Arkansas River.

There’s a lot in the Train War story to think about related to settlement in the West: how people came, what they came for, what they fought about, what they won and lost.

ATSF gets some credit for trying to fulfill the Sante Fe part, though, I guess. A spur line did finally make it to Lamy, New Mexico, which was only 18 miles south of Santa Fe.