The end of the line

Late this afternoon, photographer Bob Eisthen and I stand on a dirt levee in the Texas border town of Presidio. To our south sits Presidio's larger sister town of Ojinaga in Mexico. To our north, literally beneath our feet, a pair of rails is smothered by the recently built levee, and a few hundred feet further north a timber railroad bridge lies buckled and destroyed by a fire. This is the end, in the U.S., of Arthur Stilwell's dream to build a railroad with the shortest distance between Kansas City and the Pacific Ocean, the Kansas City, Mexico & Orient. A gap of a quarter mile separates the U.S. and Mexican portions of his railroad, and through that gap trickles the Rio Grande, under the watchful eyes of Border Patrol agents.

Before you dry a tear, I should tell you there is a happy ending to this tale. I'm saving most of it for a feature story in Trains Magazine that will appear later this year. The short version is this: The bankrupt KCM&O was sold to the Santa Fe Railway in 1928 (an oil boom south of San Angelo allowed the bankruptcy trustee to dress up the pig and find a buyer before the boom busted). Santa Fe finished the railroad from Alpine, Tex., to Presidio and practiced beneign neglect for many decades. Then about 1990, as it shed branch lines, Santa Fe abandoned most of the former KCM&O trackage in Kansas, Oklahoma, and north Texas and sold the lower 384 miles to a startup called the South Orient Railroad. The South Orient went belly up within a decade and sought to abandon the entire line. The state of Texas stepped in, bought it for practically nothing, and in 2001 or thereabouts awarded a 50-year lease to Texas-Pacifico Transportation, the subsidiary of Grupo Mexico, a Mexican mining conglomorate. Think of this as the regional railroad nobody ever heard of in the part of Texas where nobody ever goes.

At the time, someone said it would be a cold day in hell when Texas-Pacifico made money with this pathetic loser. Actually, I think that someone was me. The track was almost impassible, very few customers remained, and all were near San Angelo on the north end. Sure enough, TP regularly lost about $1.5 million a year. Had Texas not invested millions in shoring up the physical condition of this property, Texas-Pacifico would perhaps, like the South Orient, have given up. But Grupo Mexico, the parent of Texas-Pacifico, has deep pockets and hung in there.

Cut to the quick: It is today a cold day in hell. Hydraulic fracturing started south of San Angelo, in precisely the locale of the oil boom of the 1920s, and it is happy days all over again. Oilfield traffic, mostly fracking sand from the midwest, is flooding onto Texas-Pacifico by the trainload. The railroad that had eight employees at the start of 2012 now has 60. In 2012 and 2013, TP made back all of its losses of the previous decade and has reinvested all of those new-found profits in the property.

So that's the story Bob and I have been reporting. Yesterday, however, we bid our goodbye to the busy San Angelo end of the railroad and headed south. By late afternoon we reach Fort Stockton, Tex., 161 miles down the road and as far as Texas-Pacifico has operated trains the past seven years. One reason is that there are no customers in the 147 miles beyond Fort Stockton to Presidio. The other is that burned-down bridge on the U.S. side of the border; it stands in the way of international traffic.

We speak to the engineer and conductor of the Fort Stockton crew. They have just gotten back from Titan, 14 miles to the northeast, where they switched a fracking sand customer and exchanged cars with a turn from San Angelo. They can't switch their sand customers in Fort Stockton because a sand truck has bottomed out trying to cross the lead track and so far nobody can budge it. We leave and an hour later tie up in Alpine, Tex., 63 miles toward Presidio.

Today Bob and I decide to make it to the end of the line, to the burned Rio Grande bridge in Presidio. There will be no trains, of course, but we can't report a story on Arthur Stilwell's dream and skip Presidio.

Our trip is simply unbelievable. To begin with, the Orient--excuse me, Texas-Pacifico--uses trackage rights on Union Pacific's Sunset Route to get from Alpine across Paisano Pass, 11 miles. At Paisano, the rusty rails (70- and 90-pound product rolled before 1930) head south into what is, for lack of a better expression, utter loneliness. Near the Big Bend of the Rio Grande, the land is hilly and even mountainous, desert dry, and depopulated. God help you out here if your car gets in trouble. 

U.S. Highway 67 to Presidio runs miles and miles to the west of the railroad. We detour onto Ranch Road 169 for 25 miles, and just where the pavement gives out to a rutted path we encounter our railroad. We are in Nowheresville. There is nothing in a 30-mile radius but a dirt-poor ranch house every now and then. But where Ranch Road 169 intersects the Orient is a place with a name in the current employee timetable (Plata), a siding (still), and a state historical marker. Never mind that nothing has gone over these rails the past seven years heavier than a hi-rail vehicle. We are fascinated.

The historical marker says that Plata once stood on the trail between San Antonio and Chihuahua in northern Mexico. It was settled about 1870 by John Davis of North Carolina, who established a peach orchard and trading post and would offer visitors peach brandy when they passed through on their way west or south. Others came, including Robert Ellison, who shipped 3,000 of his father's cattle by train to Alpine, then herded them south over land to Plata. It appears there were a lot of dry-land farmers who scratched out a living. Over time, all these farmers failed. Today the home of John Davis is a ruins, over which some sympathetic soul built a shelter to slow the inevitable decay. Bob turns to me and asks: Who in his right mind would start a settlement here? I have no answer.

When Santa Fe pushed the rails from Alpine to Presidio, it followed Alamito Creek for many, many miles. Of course, to call it a creek 360 days of the year is a joke, but on the ranch road to Plata there are numerous depressions that are flooded in the rare rainstorms. Bob and I turn back to U.S. Highway 67 and resume our trip to Presidio. Once there, Apple Maps shows us a way to reach the bridge, or rather, where the bridge once stood. But the streets Apple Maps says are there are not there. So I switch to Google Maps. Voila! You learn that in Presidio, streets near the international border are unpaved, unmarked by signs, and almost undrivable.

But we finally reach the levee that parallels the river. Bob and I are thinking: Are we allowed here? We've seen no signs to say otherwise. But 100 feet away from us is the river and Mexico. Sure enough, a green-striped Border Patrol vehicle heads toward the levee to intercept us. The agent, very friendly, asks where we're going. We tell him, and he says just continue on and we'll reach the railroad. So we do. Two fires, in 2008 and 2009, destroyed the U.S. end of the rail connection in Presidio between Mexico and the U.S. Texas-Pacifico wants to rebuild its part of the bridge (the Mexico portion, made of cement, still stands) and it appears this may happen in 2015. Then we shall see whether this gateway is a viable connection between the two countries.

And we will see how long this oil boom lasts. It's a given that all oil booms end in busts (sometimes followed by new booms). Federico Diaz, the executive vice president of Texas-Pacifico, says to give him five years. In that time frame, his hope is to make the entire railroad operational, develop a diversified customer base and be able to survive as a far smaller operation than today but a bigger one than before the boom.

All these thoughts swirl through my mind as Bob and I stand on that levee in Presidio. Before we leave, I take out my iPhone and click a photo looking north. Here the railroad remains a ruin. Of course, a few short years ago the entire railroad was a ruin, unable to make ends meet, even on a shoestring budget. But now, as I said, it is a cold day in hell.--Fred W. Frailey