Southwestern Historical Quarterly

History of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway is now available in a new edition that elevates and expands the original volume, first published [End Page 104] in 1974 by Keith L. Bryant Jr. The 2020 version, with the help of the same abundance of maps (twenty) and illustrations (eighty-seven), delineates the business history of the ATSF. Its chief addition is an examination of the period 1970 to 1995, when, one might assume (wrongly), circumstances would have doomed the railroad.

Like the earlier version, the new edition should have a broad readership. Railroad nostalgists will appreciate the attention to the ATSF's distinctive features: its long association with Harvey House eateries and the Native American motifs that dominated its advertising campaigns, for example. Businesspeople may delight in various dramatic accounts, such as the one about the railway's machinations, legally and on the ground physically, to secure a route into New Mexico via Ratón Pass, or, more recently, about the bidding war and unexpected boardroom clash that accompanied the ATSF's merger with the Burlington Northern Railroad. Students of Texas history will value its in-depth descriptions of the railway's extension into the High Plains, Panhandle, eastern and central regions, and Gulf Coast.

The authors make a convincing case for the ATSF's unique character, namely, its leaders' largely successful efforts to maintain the system's independence, the railway's relatively positive popular reputation (compared to the Southern Pacific), and its tradition of judiciousness on the financial front. Bryant and Frailey combine biographical sketches of ATSF officials with thorough explanations as to how each one made a mark on the railroad's development. The new section on the ATSF's final twenty-five years highlights, for instance, president Michael Haverty's significant expansion of the railway's intermodal business and the highly strategic cost-cutting measures of Robert Krebs. The preface to the first edition promises attention to the relationship between the ATSF and the towns and cities it served. In this edition's telling, the symbiosis was mutually beneficial, as the ATSF contributed to the Southwest's booming population and economy, while the proceeds from passenger ticket sales and freight traffic in cotton, coal, timber, cattle, the hard red wheat of Mennonite farmers, and oil allowed the ATSF to invest in modern equipment, new construction, improved locomotive design, and diesel technology.

While they claim that the book is not an "official" history (xvi), Bryant and Frailey rely heavily on the ATSF's massive corporate archives. They do not reference recent scholarship, like Richard White's Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (W. W. Norton, 2011), which questions the depiction of railway giants as a civilizing, progressive force. Likewise, although one stated aim is to relate ATSF "managers and workers" beyond "numbers and names" (xvi), ATSF employees are largely anonymous, marginal actors in their story. Far more ink is spent on the décor of parlor cars and railroad-owned hotels, the evolution of steam engines, and elegant Harvey House menu items than on the experiences and perspectives of the workers who made the wheels turn. The chapter [End Page 105] on dieselization devotes pages to the evolution and fate of machinery but only one paragraph to the mortal blows that diesel dealt many railroad towns. In other words, although the book acknowledges the ATSF's managerial missteps, it conveys the world of the ATSF chiefly from the vantage point of its executives, who saw "loyal" employees and abandoned roundhouses in the periphery of their vision and Populists and unionists as noisy, deluded obstacles in their path. One hopes the corporate archives are open to historians who wish to move beyond Bryant and Frailey and seek to understand the broader human dimensions of the ATSF story.