Re: San Juan Extension and profitability

I remember Bob Richardson telling me this as well as reading somewhere that the Rio Grande tried to turn down El Paso Natural Gas Co on the pipe haul into Farmington because they concluded that with the trans-shipment of pipe in Alamosa and the necessity to rehabilitate much of the track, plus the necessity of rehabbing and converting cars for the pipe traffic, that there was no possibility of making a profit. I believe that El Paso turned to the ICC and got a ruling forcing the Rio Grande to take the traffic because there was simply no way of hauling that volume of pipe into Farmington by truck, given both the trucks and the roads of the 1950s in that area.

Whether they ever made a profit or not, I do not know, only that they thought that they would not and could not.

I hope that someone out there can go into this in more detail.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/08/2021 09:52AM by Everett Lueck.