Williams, Arizona: The Last Town the Interstate Left Behind
Near Williams, Arizona
On October thirteenth, nineteen eighty-four, a ceremony was held on the edge of Williams, Arizona, that nobody was particularly happy about. The final segment of Interstate Forty in Arizona officially opened, bypassing Williams and completing the transcontinental freeway from Barstow, California to the North Carolina coast. Route Sixty-Six, the Mother Road, was now completely circumvented between Chicago and Santa Monica. Williams was the last incorporated town on the entire route to be bypassed, and local officials knew exactly what was coming.
Williams had seen what the interstate did to other Route Sixty-Six towns. Winslow. Holbrook. Seligman. The pattern was consistent: bypass opens, traffic drops by ninety percent within a few years, motels go vacant, diners close, the commercial strip empties out. Williams expected the same and spent the years before the bypass opening trying to figure out how to avoid that outcome.
The answer turned out to be sitting in the old Santa Fe Railway freight yard: a historic steam locomotive that had once hauled passengers to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, a service abandoned in nineteen sixty-eight when the highway was considered more convenient. In nineteen eighty-nine, just five years after the bypass opened, a group of investors restored the rail service and reopened the Grand Canyon Railway, running vintage-style trains from Williams to Grand Canyon Village, sixty-four miles to the north.
The choice proved durable. Williams is now the official gateway town for Grand Canyon rail tourism, drawing visitors specifically because of the train, specifically because of the absence of the highway it replaces. The town's historic commercial strip has been preserved and restored, the brick storefronts housing restaurants and gift shops and small hotels. Route Sixty-Six memorabilia fills the windows.
The ceremony in October of nineteen eighty-four was the last such ceremony anyone would ever hold, the final acknowledgment that the old road was finished as a working transcontinental highway. Williams turned the bypass into an advertisement and the advertisement into a business. The steam locomotive still pulls the train on select days.
