NEW MEXICO: End of the Chili Line

Santa Fe’s stucco buildings were hung with banners and streamers, decorated with huge, garish masks. The streets were noisy with drunken yells all through the night and far into the morning. New Mexico’s City of the Holy Faith was busy last week celebrating La Fiesta, and in no mood to mourn.

But one grey day, while Santa Fe’s celebrants slept, a little group of mourners gathered in the yellow old Denver and Rio Grande Western depot to watch the train pull out. It was the last run of the “Chili Line” and the end of the D.&R.G.W.’s famous track—the narrow-gauge line from Santa Fe, 125 miles to Antonito, Colo.

The story of the D.&R.G.W. was the story of General William J. Palmer, who came to Colorado after the Civil War with dreams of an empire and a railroad to Mexico City. He decided to lay narrow-gauge tracks, reasoning that that would be the only practical means of scaling the Rockies.

A pioneer, he was prepared to defend his narrow-gauge ideas from any and every angle. Narrow-gauge Pullmans would be an advantage, said he, because “the coaches would not be so wide as to allow the sleeper to roll with the movement of the train.” Said a caustic newspaper writer:

“All who have . . . survived a night in a narrow-gauge Pullman can corroborate the General. None but those built like Beanpoles could get into the berths at all, and then only by lying edgewise.”

The General’s dream of a road to Mexico City finally went glimmering, but the D.&R.G.W. became part of a famous system. And the branch which twisted up the sides of the Rio Grande canyon, skirted precipices 1,000 feet above the river, labored across the sagebrush acres of the sun-drenched plateau, climbed 9,000 feet in the air, and finally shot down into whitewashed Antonito, lived on to nurture some fabulous tales: of how they had to hinge the engine’s boiler in the middle to get it around the curves; of how the conductor in the caboose bummed chewing tobacco from the engineer in his cab as the little train coiled back on itself on hairpin turns; of how buffalo charged the pint-sized engines ; of how the train rolled down the mountain so fast it reached Antonito ahead of the sound of its whistle.

Much of the freight it hauled was chili peppers. That was how it got its name. But when busses and trucks began to compete, business on the Chili dwindled. Offi cials of the D.&R.G.W. asked the Interstate Commerce Commission for permission to abandon the line. Permission was granted, and last week the mourners gath ered, and wreckers moved in to “roll up” the track.

At Antonito, Conductor Henry Willis, who had spent almost a quarter of a century on the run, climbed carefully down. No sentimentalist, Conductor Willis exclaimed, ” I’m glad to get off that danged rattletrap.”