Re: Chili Line rail piled up at Antonito

A pair of newspaper clippings:

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Stacked beside the tracks of the 200-mile Alamosa-Antonito Durango narrow gauge line, on which busy little locomotives pull heavy loads of rock, coal and minerals, are 16,825 tons of rails and vast salvage piles of ties and bridge timbers taken up from the 125-mile Chili line to Santa Fe, N. M., abandoned last September.

Following the Chili line abandonment, negotiations were started for shipping the track and equipment to China.

Military events blocked the negotiations. Now much of the pulled up track will go to steel mills as scrap and some will be used as replacement material for remaining narrow gauge lines.

Antonio was the junction point of the Chili and Durango lines from 1881 until last year.



Amarillo Daily News, July 18, 1942


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Chili Line Cars
Go Traveling;
Hawaii and Mexico

Eleven narrow gauge flat cars,
four refrigerator cars and two oil
tankers ased on the Chili line bet-
tween Alamosa and Santa Fe before
the line was abandoned have been
sold by the Denver and Rio Grande
Western Railway.. company to the
government for service at the naval
supply depot in Pearl harbor, it was
learned here today.

They were reconditioned in the
Alamosa, Colo., car shops, painted a
gay yellow and sent to San Fran-
cisco on standard gauge flat cars.

Engines 384 and 385, familiar
sights in the Chile line yards here,
were sold to the Mexican govern-
ment.

Santa Fe New Mexican, Feb 25, 1942

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