Belen: Hub City of the Southwest

You are passing through Belen, New Mexico, a town that wears two very different centuries on its sleeve.

The name comes from Nuestra Senora de Belen, Our Lady of Bethlehem. In seventeen forty, Captain Don Diego Torres and a colonist named Antonio Salazar led a group of colonist families south from Albuquerque along the Rio Grande and established a community on fertile bottomlands here, a settlement that had grown to about forty families within a few years. Those settlers included a group of genizaros, Hispanicized Indians absorbed into the Spanish colonial world, giving the founding village an unusually mixed composition from the very start.

Belen stayed small and agricultural for one hundred and forty years. Then, in eighteen eighty, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway laid its main line through town and everything changed. Belen became a watering stop, a division point, a place where trains changed crews and equipment was serviced.

The real transformation came in nineteen oh eight. The Santa Fe completed what railroad men called the Belen Cutoff, a new two-hundred-and-fifty-nine-mile southern route from Texas that bypassed the brutal grades of Raton Pass on the New Mexico-Colorado border. Raton Pass forced trains to climb at one hundred and fifty-eight feet of elevation per mile. The Belen Cutoff reduced that to sixty-six feet per mile on its worst stretch, with a maximum grade of just one and a quarter percent through Abo Canyon. The savings in fuel, time, and locomotive wear were enormous. Within a year the Cutoff had become the prime east-west freight corridor across the continent, and Belen became what locals still call Hub City.

To serve the surge of travelers that followed, Fred Harvey built one of his famous Harvey Houses here in nineteen ten. Harvey had revolutionized railroad dining by hiring young women from the East, his Harvey Girls, who agreed to six-month contracts and lived under strict house rules in exchange for room, board, and wages. The Belen Harvey House ran until nineteen thirty-nine, and its restored building now houses a museum on the National Register of Historic Places.

Today BNSF Railway still operates its largest inspection yard on the Southern Transcon through Belen, processing trains that stretch a mile and a half long. The freight roar you may have heard crossing this town echoes the same economics that put it on the map more than a century ago.