Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway

The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway (reporting mark ATSF), often referred to as the Santa Fe or AT&SF, was one of the largest Class 1 railroads in the United States between 1859 and 1996.

The Santa Fe was a pioneer in intermodal freight transport; at various times, it operated an airline, the short-lived Santa Fe Skyway, and the Santa Fe Railroad tugboats. Its bus line extended passenger transportation to areas not accessible by rail, and ferryboats on the San Francisco Bay allowed travelers to complete their westward journeys to the Pacific Ocean. The AT&SF was the subject of a popular song, Harry Warren and Johnny Mercer's "On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe", written for the film The Harvey Girls (1946).

The railroad officially ceased independent operations on December 31, 1996, when it merged with the Burlington Northern Railroad to form the Burlington Northern and 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:

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.