Game of Thrones author George RR Martin and two other New Mexico celebrities have purchased the Santa Fe Southern Railroad and the depot in Lamy. SFSR was featured in the Breaking Bad episode, Dead Freight.
The State of New Mexico bought the track bed that Amtrak's Southwest Chief uses from just north of Lamy to Behlen south of Albuquerque from the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway when the Rail Runner was built. BNSF owns virtually all the rail rights of way in New Mexico. Two congressional neighbors now Democratic governors in Colorado and New Mexico have been pledging to develop passenger rail along the Front Range and southern Rockies. Meanwhile the Trump Organization is pledging to kill passenger rail service while vehicle traffic between the Black Hills, Cheyenne and Denver continues to increase just like it is between Denver, Albuquerque and Santa Fe.
The New Mexico Rail Runner has been idled since March 15 but is scheduled to resume service May 31 as work on the line to complete Positive Train Control continues.
Violet Crown cinema owner Bill Banowsky, novelist and screenwriter George R.R. Martin and NDI New Mexico co-founder Catherine Oppenheimer have bought the decades-old railway and trains along the 18-mile spur line from Santa Fe to Lamy. If all goes well, they hope to renew a deal with Amtrak that would keep the Southwest Chief line stopping at Lamy and perhaps restore a now-vacant position for a ticket agent at the site. The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway reached Lamy in 1879. Though it had originally been planned to roll into Santa Fe, railroad executives and engineers said it would be too difficult to build a main track to the capital city because of the steep grade in the mountainous environment, so they settled for a spur line. [Santa Fe New Mexican]
Who has the power to perform an experiment to make a deal with the Santa Fe Southern to Lamy, put a locomotive on each end of three or four cars and put the Rail Runner into Trinidad, Colorado? @BNSFRailway https://t.co/0faATxy8Kr #nmleg #nmpol #coleg #copolitics— interested party (@larry_kurtz) December 10, 2018
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