Tracking World War II Railroad Operations Across New Mexico

Before the first atomic bomb was completed in 1945 at Los Alamos, New Mexico, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway (AT&SF) was operating twenty-four hours a day hauling war materials and troops across the state on its transcontinental line from Los Angeles to Chicago.

Maintenance workers for the tracks and locomotives were provided by the diverse population of New Mexico, including Native Americans, Hispanics, and African Americans. With locomotive repair shops and freight yards in Clovis, Albuquerque, and Gallup, the state was well positioned to service the railroad during World War II. Documenting all this railroad activity in New Mexico for the U.S. Office of War Information (OWI) was photographer Jack Delano, a native-born Ukrainian.

In 1942, the OWI assigned him to photograph the wartime rail system from Chicago to the West Coast. He traveled the AT&SF line west across the deserts and mountains of New Mexico in March 1943, and his photographs, featured in this book, chronicle the heroic efforts of New Mexico’s populace to keep the railroad running across their state.