Raton: The Railroad Town on the Pass
New Mexico
Raton exists because of a race. In eighteen seventy-eight, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad and the Denver and Rio Grande were both sprinting toward Raton Pass, the only practical crossing of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Santa Fe crews arrived first, staking the route before their rivals could.
A town called Willow Springs was laid out here in eighteen eighty after railroad officials bought three hundred twenty acres from the Maxwell Land Grant, one of the largest private landholdings in American history. They renamed it Raton, Spanish for mouse, after a nearby lava-capped peak. Coal came next.
The Santa Fe formed the Raton Coal and Coke Company that same year, and within two decades more than two thousand men were mining the surrounding canyons, fueling the locomotives that built the Southwest. When the railroad opened the Belen Cutoff across the southern plains in nineteen oh eight, most freight traffic bypassed the Pass, though passenger trains kept using the mountain route to serve Colorado, and Raton settled into its quieter role as a mountain gateway on the Santa Fe Trail corridor.
