The Grand Canyon Railway: Eighty-Eight Years to the Day
Near Williams, Arizona
On September seventeenth, nineteen zero one, the first passenger train ran from Williams north across the Coconino Plateau to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, sixty-four miles through the ponderosa forest. The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway had pushed the spur line through in less than a year, and the arrival of rail service at the canyon's edge transformed what had been a remote and difficult journey into something any traveler could manage. The railroad built the legendary El Tovar Hotel on the rim in nineteen zero five, and for decades the train was the primary way Americans reached one of the continent's greatest natural wonders.
Then the automobile did what it did to nearly every American railroad. Car ownership spread, highways improved, and the passenger train began its slow fade. The last regularly scheduled Santa Fe passenger train to the Grand Canyon ran in July of nineteen sixty-eight.
The line sat dormant for more than twenty years. In the late nineteen eighties, a couple named Max and Thelma Biegert, who had no railroad background, decided to restore it. They bought the line, restored the locomotives and the Williams depot, rebuilt the track, and on September seventeenth, nineteen eighty-nine, ran the first train.
The date was not a coincidence. It was exactly eighty-eight years to the day after the first run in nineteen zero one. The Grand Canyon Railway now carries around two hundred twenty-five thousand passengers a year from Williams to the South Rim.
The Williams depot, built in nineteen zero eight and restored by the Biegerts, remains one of the finest small railroad stations in the American Southwest.
