Santa Fe Railway Shops (Albuquerque)
The former Santa Fe Railway Shops in Albuquerque, New Mexico, consist of eighteen surviving buildings erected between 1915 and 1925. The complex is located south of downtown in the Barelas neighborhood, bounded by Second Street, Hazeldine Avenue, Commercial Street, and Pacific Avenue. The shops were one of four major maintenance facilities constructed by the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, the others being located in Topeka, Kansas, Cleburne, Texas, and San Bernardino, California. The railway shops were the largest employer in the city during the railroad's heyday. Currently they have been empty for years but a variety of plans have been proposed for the historic complex. History Railroad shops and a roundhouse were first erected on the site in the 1880s, after Albuquerque was designated as the division point between the AT&SF railway and the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad. After buying out the A&P in 1902, the Santa Fe Railway began expanding and modernizing the old A&P shops in 1912. The first buildings to be completed were the roundhouse, storehouse, power station, and freight car shops, all of which were located south of the surviving complex near the present Bridge Boulevard overpass. These structures have since been demolished, but the subsequent buildings completed after 1915 are all still standing. The current railyard buildings were constructed between 1915 and 1925. The shops became Albuquerque's largest employer, with 970 employees (then about a quarter of the city's workforce) in 1919, and a peak of 1,500 in the 1940s. The core operation was maintenance of steam locomotives, which required a complete rebuild every 12 to 18 months. At their peak, the Albuquerque shops completed around 40 such overhauls per month. However, activity at the railyard declined in the 1950s as the Santa Fe transitioned from steam to diesel locomotives. The railroad decided to locate its diesel repair facilities at the Cleburne and San Bernardino yards, scaling back operations in Albuquerque to around 200 employees. The shops continued to operate as maintenance-of-way equipment repair shops into the 1980s. Buildings Erection/Machine shop By far the largest building at the railyard is the erection and machine shop, which spans the full width of the site from Second to Commercial and contains about of floor space. The building was designed in 1920 and built in eight months starting in February 1921. The erection shop and machine shop are within one building, separated by a wall on the south side of the erection shop. At the time it was considered to be at the forefront of industrial design, comparable to the Glass Plant at the Ford River Rouge Complex in Michigan. The building has a steel structure, with uninterrupted glass curtain walls on the north and south faces and more substantial reinforced concrete facades on the east and west sides. The expansive main bay (erection shop) is high and long with several overhead cranes, the largest of which has a 250-ton capacity. The building is floored with wooden blocks to cut down on noise. Boiler shop The smaller