Overhaul: A Social History of the Albuquerque Locomotive Repair Shops

OVERHAUL

OVERHAUL

RICHARD FLINT &

SHIRLEY CUSHING FLINT

A Social History of

the Albuquerque

Locomotive

Repair Shops

© 2021 by Richard Flint and Shirley Cushing Flint

All rights reserved. Published 2021

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN 978-0-8263-6249-0 (paper)

ISBN 978-0-8263-6250-6 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is on file

with the Library of Congress

Cover photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress,

Prints and Photograph Division

Designed by Felicia Cedillos

Contents

List of Illustrations

List of Tables

Introduction

Chapter 1. Albuquerque and Western Steam Railroading in the 1870s

Chapter 2. The Requirements of Steam

Chapter 3. Albuquerque and the Locomotive Repair Shops in the Early 1880s

Chapter 4. The Railroad’s Immediate and Lasting Impact: The 1880s and 1890s

Chapter 5. Overhauling Steam Locomotives

Chapter 6. Job Specialties

Chapter 7. The Workforce: 1880–1900

Chapter 8. Work Schedules and Routines

Chapter 9. Albuquerque and the Locomotive Repair Shops: 1901–1922

Chapter 10. The Railroad Shopmen’s Strikes of 1893 and 1922

Chapter 11. State of the Art: Building the New Shops, 1914–1924

Chapter 12. The Heyday of the Shops: 1925–1950

Chapter 13. The End of Steam: The 1950s

Chapter 14. Shopwomen and African American and Hispanic Shopmen

Chapter 15. Purchase and Redevelopment of the Rail Yards by the City of Albuquerque

Chapter 16. Conclusion: The Impact of the Shops on Albuquerque and New Mexico

Appendix 1. Agreement between William Hazledine and Franz Huning

Appendix 2. Ethnicity of Shopworkers (Surname Proxy), AT&SF Albuquerque Locomotive Repair Shops

Appendix 3. Guide to Steam Locomotive Components

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Maps

1.1. Central New Mexico, Whipple Route

3.1. Map of John Phelan and Franz Huning’s Highland Addition, December 1880

4.1. Albuquerque in 1918 with the Locomotive Repair Shops and Streetcar Line

10.1. National Map Showing Railroads and Coal Mining Areas Affected by Strikes

Figures

1.1. West side of Old Town Plaza, Albuquerque, NM, ca. 1880

1.2. Celebration of Completion of Transcontinental Railroad, May 10, 1869

1.3. Engine at Raton tunnel, 1886–1888?

1.4. 9th Cavalry Band on the Plaza, Santa Fe, NM, 1880

1.5. Arrival of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad, Albuquerque, NM, April 1880

2.1. Sectioned Fire-Tube Locomotive Boiler and Firebox

2.2. Diagrammatic Cross-Section

2.3. Railroad Wheel Showing Flange and Steel Tire

3.1. Railroad (Central) Avenue at 1st Street, 1881

3.2. Detail from Bird’s Eye View of Albuquerque, 1886

3.3 Old Machine Shop

4.1. Charles Ilfeld Company Warehouse in 1977

5.1. AT&SF locomotive #3914, February 1948

5.2. Jacketing plan for AT&SF locomotive #2926

5.3. Schematic Drawing of a Steam Locomotive’s Power Train

5.4. Locomotives Under Repair in the Erecting Bay, February 1948

5.5. Shopworkers Man-handling a Drive Rod onto a Cross-head

5.6. Hammering out a Drawbar

5.7. Engineering drawings of an 80,000-lb Capacity Truck

5.8. Tool Room

5.9. C&O Steam Locomotive #3020 after the Explosion of its Boiler

5.10. Santa Fe Railway Hospital at Albuquerque, 1880s

6.1. Apprentice Drawing of a Railroad Tire

7.1. Locomotive #1361 on the Turntable at The Roundhouse in Las Vegas, NM, 1917

7.2. Jacoby’s Albuquerque Foundry, 1880s

7.3. Albuquerque Locomotive Repair Shops, ca. 1900

8.1. Shopworkers Washing Up, 1943

8.2. Shopworkers Checking out for Lunch, 1943

8.3. Albuquerque Steam Laundry on S. 2nd Street, 1880s

8.4. Safety Warning Sign, Depicting the Character Acci Dent

8.5. Shopworkers Leaving the Grounds of the Locomotive Repair Shops by the West Gate, 1943

8.6. Albuquerque Shops’ All-Star Baseball Team

8.7. Albuquerque YMCA Building, Early 1900s

8.8. Retirement Party for Frank G. Gómez, Sheet Metal Worker, and Raven Bean, Machinist, 1958

9.1. The American Lumber Company Complex, ca. 1908

9.2. Architectural Drawing of the North and East Elevations of the AT&SF’s Alvarado Hotel, 1932

9.3. Red Ball Café on 4th Street SW, Albuquerque, NM

10.1. Ad for Shopworkers, July 23, 1922

10.2. Button Commemorating the 1922 Shopmen’s Strike

11.1. Crew of African American Mule Drivers, October 1915

11.2. Store Department

11.3. Storekeepers of the Entire Santa Fe System, September 27–29, 1915

11.4. North Façade of the New Blacksmith Shop, Built in 1914

11.5. Interior of New Blacksmith Shop, 1948

11.6. New Machine Shop Under Construction, 1922

11.7. Interior of the Erecting Bay, Showing North Steel and Glass Curtain Wall, 2014

11.8. Arrival of Mammoth Girders, 1922

11.9. Floor Area of New Machine Shop at Albuquerque, with Concrete-lined Inspection Pits, 1922

11.10. Floor Plan of the New Machine Shop, 1932

11.11. Wheels in Heavy Machine Bay, 1943

11.12. Tender of Locomotive #3874 Exiting the Machine Shop onto the Transfer Table, 1943

11.13. Operator’s Cab of the Transfer Table, 2020

11.14. Site Plan Showing the Layout of New [1920s] and Old [1880s] Buildings

11.15. Machine Shop at AT&SF’s Repair Shops in Cleburne, Texas, 1935–1945

11.16. On-site Office of J. E. Nelson & Sons, the General Contractor for Building the New Albuquerque Shops, 1922

12.1. Albuquerque Buses, 1956

12.2. Schedule of the Albuquerque Bus Company, October 1929

12.3. Albuquerque Country Club Clubhouse Under Construction, 1920s

12.4. New AT&SF Association Hospital, 1925?

12.5. AT&SF Super Chief Diesel Locomotive, 1935

12.6. Aerial photo of Kirtland Army Airbase, April 1942

13.1. Newspaper Ad for AT&SF’s New Diesel Locomotive Fleet, 1953

14.1. Presentation of the Minute Man flag at Santa Fe Shops, Albuquerque, June 1943, for a War Bond Drive

14.2. Group Photo of the 1937 Albuquerque Machine Shop Staff

15.1. Demolition of the Alvarado Hotel, a Harvey House Hotel in Albuquerque, 1970

15.2. WHEELS Museum building, 1100 2nd Street SW, Albuquerque, NM

Tables

5.1. Required Inspections on AT&SF Steam Locomotives

6.1. Employee Titles, Albuquerque Locomotive Repair Shops, 1896

6.2. AT&SF, Number of Full-Time Employees and Amount of Compensation, 1950

11.1. Selected AT&SF Locomotives Compared by Size and Power

13.1. AT&SF Number of Steam and Diesel Locomotives, 1949–1955

13.2. Ethnicity (Surname Proxy) of AT&SF Employees Living on South 3rd Street and South Broadway in Albuquerque, 1896, 1919, and 1950.

Introduction

It has been more than sixty-five years since the last overhauled steam locomotive left an erecting bay at the Albuquerque Locomotive Repair Shops and returned to road service on the Santa Fe Railway. After the intervening years, marked by at least three human generations, only a few shopworkers remain who have firsthand memory of the painstaking work that went on at the Shops—and even secondhand memories are fading. Those dimming memories are often of huge neglected and decaying buildings: broken glass littering the ground and graffiti-tagged walls, interspersed with piles of junked metal and other debris.

Largely forgotten are the Shops’ heyday, the seventy-five years between 1880 and 1955, when the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe (AT&SF) Railway was far and away the largest employer in Albuquerque, paying solid, consistent wages that supported thriving middle-class communities on both sides of the Santa Fe main line to California. By the 1960s and 1970s, though, the barrios of Barelas (to the west) and San José (to the east) were rundown and in the process of abandonment. Urban renewal projects, designed to eradicate the blight but underfunded, left dilapidated buildings and gap-toothed cityscapes.

Fewer and fewer Albuquerqueans remember the blocks of well-kept houses and neat gardens that preceded the rundown barrios of the Shops district. Neither do they remember that steady railroad incomes of hundreds of families over generations established and solidified the middle-class status and expectations of thousands of workers and their families. Although not always as rosy as that sounds, the wages of many shopworkers raised their own and their children’s and grandchildren’s positions in society to levels their forebears could only dream of.

Among the descendants of AT&SF shopmen and women whom we interviewed for this book, there are the mother of a US congresswoman, a former chief justice of the New Mexico Supreme Court, lawyers, teachers, engineers, successful and well-known businesspeople, popular sports figures, many college graduates, proud members in good standing of the Albuquerque and New Mexico communities, as well as more distant communities. As has been apparent from study of other US industrial-manufacturing cities, steady work and rising incomes from the late nineteenth century until the middle of the twentieth fostered widespread optimism and provided the wherewithal to realize many of the hopes and plans of AT&SF Shop families.

One of our primary objectives in writing Overhaul has been to lay out the reciprocal effects that the resident Hispanic and Native American population of the Middle Rio Grande Valley and the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway have had on each other, both positive and negative. The extended encounter and accommodation of resident peoples with a major industry has strongly affected both. Albuquerque’s uniqueness among New Mexico communities arose and has been reinforced because of the coming and development of the AT&SF Locomotive Repair Shops.

Originally all but excluded from potential benefits of the overnight arrival of industrialization in their midst, Hispanos and Native Americans came to comprise the majority of skilled workers at the Shops by the mid-twentieth century. A very significant result of incorporation of large numbers of Hispanos and Native Americans into the skilled AT&SF workforce was the rise of a substantial and stable middle-class population in the Barelas and San José neighborhoods of Albuquerque. That middle-class population gradually expanded and spread to other areas of the city, the state, and the country. The effect on generations of descendants of AT&SF shopworkers has been transformational, a fact that we detail with many examples.

Like many other American industrial cities, Albuquerque suffered a serious, but not irreparable, blow when the major industry, in this case the Locomotive Repair Shops, closed in the 1970s. Albuquerque though, unlike many other industrially based cities, transitioned within just a few years into a financial and supply hub for oil, gas, and mining activity within the state, which boomed from the 1950s to the 1980s, and is currently experiencing another upsurge. Furthermore, Albuquerque’s economic base diversified through burgeoning involvement in atomic and alternative energy research and development; federal land management; support of tribal communities, higher education, and healthcare; manufacturing related to computerization and digitalization of many aspects of American life; and, most recently, as a film production and coordination center.

What started it all was establishment in the 1880s of a major steam locomotive repair facility and the foundation of modern Albuquerque. It is the story of the people, the place, and the work of the Shops that fills the pages of this book. The sources we used to compile that story range from interviews with former shopworkers and their descendants to photographs and site plans; from annual reports of the AT&SF Railway Company to contemporaneous newspaper accounts of daily happenings at the Shops; from meticulous studies by professional historians and social scientists to engineering specifications and manuals; from city directories and census data to architectural analyses; from the records of major strikes to payrolls for machinists and boilermakers; from reports of the US Geological Survey to issues of the Santa Fe Employees’ Magazine.

The point is that we have incorporated into Overhaul and have taken into account a wide range of sources in an effort to provide the most rounded and diverse view of what made up life and work in and around the Shops over its seventy-five-year lifespan. Overhaul is a record of many things that were once common knowledge to the residents of Albuquerque.

For decades, the city set its clocks and determined its rhythm by the steam whistle at the Shops. Everyone knew that the Shops were the clanging heart of Albuquerque. They set the city apart from its neighbors. From the beginning, they represented the energy and innovation that were driving modern life. The industrial virtuosity that was demonstrated by the best machinists produced a practical art that was second to none. Steam locomotives—great, black, clockwork machines that comprised intricate assemblages of thousands of matched and mated parts—required the creative skilled labor of integrated teams of journeymen, apprentices, and helpers in a variety of crafts to overhaul and restore them periodically, and sometimes to rebuild them from the ground up. That work and the people who performed it are what we celebrate here.

CHAPTER 1

Albuquerque and Western Steam Railroading in the 1870s

From the time of its formal founding in 1706, Albuquerque was primarily a modest farming community. As Brian Luna Lucero observes, Residents of the Middle Rio Grande Valley considered Albuquerque as one of a dozen villages along the river, and often not the most important one.¹ For about 173 years, Albuquerque changed almost imperceptibly. A description of the town written by the Franciscan friar Atanasio Domínguez in 1776 would apply broadly to the town at virtually any moment before 1880: [It] consists of twenty-four houses near the mission. The rest of what is called Albuquerque extends upstream to the north [along the Rio Grande], and all of it is a settlement of ranchos on the meadows of the said river for the distance of a league from the church. In total, Domínguez reported a population of 763.² Albuquerque’s population was estimated still at only 800, 70 years later.³

There was a small segment of Albuquerque’s population that engaged in trade at least part time. Manufactured and exotic goods were carried to Albuquerque and the rest of New Mexico by long-distance overland transport. For many decades, such imports were brought by mule train, carreta (cart), and wagon from the Mexican cities of Chihuahua, Durango, and Parral, and the mining areas of north-central Mexico, as well as points farther south. But once Mexico gained independence from Spain in 1821, merchant traffic with the United States steadily increased. New Mexican merchants, including some from Albuquerque, became regular players in the Missouri-Santa Fe-Chihuahua trade. In October 1846, Susan Shelby Magoffin, whose husband was involved in the Chihuahua trade from the United States, briefly visited the Albuquerque store of Rafael Armijo. She recorded this description in her journal: The building is very spacious, with wide portals in front. Inside is the patio, the store occupying a long room on the street—and the only one that I was in. This is filled with all kinds of little fixings, dry goods, groceries, hard-ware, etc.⁴ During the middle decades of the nineteenth century, Rafael, his brother Manuel, and cousin Salvador, all doing business in Albuquerque, were among the most prosperous merchants in the territory. They had business connections throughout New Mexico and across the United States and northern Mexico. And they were joined in long distance wholesale and local retail trade by at least six other merchant members of their family.⁵

Figure 1.1. West side of Old Town Plaza, Albuquerque, NM, ca. 1880. Courtesy of Center for Southwest Research, University Libraries, University of New Mexico; CSWR PICT 997-001-0006.

As American trader Josiah Gregg made clear in the 1840s, the staple of trade goods carted from the United States to New Mexico was fabrics, especially cottons, both bleached and brown.⁶ Nevertheless, the economy of New Mexico [including Albuquerque] at mid-century operated mostly at a subsistence level.⁷

That situation began to change significantly with occupation of New Mexico by the US Army in 1846. The stationing of between 700 and 1,000 US troops in New Mexico—soon to be a US territory—and the army’s renting of buildings as post quarters and purchasing supplies of meat and fresh produce brought a significant infusion of cash to New Mexico. The army in New Mexico injected comparatively large sums of money into what had been primarily a barter economy. The money was widely, if unevenly, distributed, reaching all segments of the population, including the Pueblo Indians. Not only did the army provide a market for some of New Mexico’s traditional products; it created a demand for products that earlier had not been available at all or had been produced in very limited quantities.⁸ The presence of the army affected Albuquerque’s economy especially, since it housed an army garrison and even served occasionally as headquarters of the military Department of New Mexico.⁹ A young US Attorney, William W. H. Davis, commented about Albuquerque in the early 1850s: The army depots are located here, which causes a large amount of money to be put in circulation, and gives employment to a number of the inhabitants.¹⁰

With eventual profound consequences for Albuquerque and the rest of New Mexico, in the 1850s, Congress directed the US Corps of Topographical Engineers to undertake four ambitious surveys across the West. Their aim was to determine the most practicable route for a railroad from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Coast. As the leader of one of those surveys, Lt. Amiel W. Whipple wrote in his report to Congress, Notwithstanding the richness of her mines of gold, of silver, of copper, and of iron, the deposits of coal that have been discovered in New Mexico have probably a more direct and practical bearing upon the project of a railway.¹¹ The summary map of the reconnaissance route prepared by Whipple depicts much of the corridor eventually followed by the main line of the Santa Fe Railway across central New Mexico. Sectional rancor followed by eruption of the monumentally destructive Civil War put the transcontinental railroad project on hold for nearly a decade after completion of the surveys.

The end of war in 1865 had further economic consequences for Albuquerque and New Mexico Territory. First, many uprooted veterans headed West, including some to New Mexico. This was especially true for Confederate veterans because the US Southeast had been devastated physically and socially by the war. As but one hint of the resulting movement, the 1870 census showed fifty-four residents of Albuquerque born outside of New Mexico.¹² Overall, Albuquerque’s population grew by just under a hundred between 1860 and 1870, but more than half of that growth comprised newcomers to the region.

A factor of major importance for New Mexico’s future was the post–Civil War explosion of railroad expansion westward from the Mississippi River. As part of the US military strategy during the Civil War, the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862 authorized creation of the first transcontinental railroad. Pivotal to Albuquerque’s future, following the Civil War the US rail network expanded from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Coast based on the 1850s surveys. The immediate task was to choose among four rival corridors: one through the northern Rocky Mountains, one through the central Rockies, another skirting the southern Rockies, and a southern desert route.¹³