Santa Fe Railroad Bed
| Santa Fe Railroad Bed 115 North Third Marion, KS 66861 Map This! |
| (620) 382-3425 |
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The railroad was initially chartered on January 11 1859 as theAtchison and Topeka Railroad Company by Cyrus K. Holliday to build from Topeka, Kansas, to Santa Fe, New Mexico, then on to the (An arm of the Atlantic south of the United States and east of Mexico) Gulf of Mexico. On May 3 1863, the railroad changed names to more closely match the aspirations of its founder to the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad. The railroad broke ground in Topeka on October 30 1868, and started building westward where one of the first construction tasks was to cross the Kaw River. The first section of track opened on April 26 1869, less than a month from the completion of the (Click link for more info and facts about First Transcontinental Railroad) First Transcontinental Railroad, with special trains between Topeka and Pauline. The distance was only 6 (A unit of length equal to 1760 yards) miles (10 (A metric unit of length equal to 1000 meters (or 0.621371 miles)) km), but the Wakarusa Picnic Special train took passengers over the route for celebration in Pauline.
Crews continued working westeard, reaching (A town of southwestern Kansas on the Arkansas River; formerly a rowdy cow town) Dodge City in 1871. With this connection, the Santa Fe was able to compete for (Domesticated bovine animals as a group regardless of sex or age) cattle transportation with the Kansas Pacific Railway. Construction continued, and the Santa Fe opened the last section of track between Topeka and the (A state in west central United States in the Rocky Mountains) Colorado/ (A state in midwestern United States) Kansas border on December 23 1873. The Santa Fe's tracks reached (Click link for more info and facts about Pueblo, Colorado) Pueblo, Colorado on March 1 1876. Serving Pueblo opened a number of new freight opportunities for the railroad as it now could haul (Fossil fuel consisting of carbonized vegetable matter deposited in the Carboniferous period) coal from Colorado eastward.
Building across Kansas and eastern Colorado may have been technologically simple as there weren't many large natural obstacles in the way (certainly not as many as the railroad was about to encounter further west), but the Santa Fe found it almost economically impossible because of the sparse population in the area. To combat this problem, the Santa Fe set up real estate offices in the area and vigorously promoted settlement across Kansas on the land that was granted to the railroad by Congress in 1863. The Santa Fe offered discounted passenger fares to anyone who travelled west on the railroad to inspect the land; if the land was subsequently purchased by the traveller, the railroad applied the passenger's ticket price toward the sale of the land.