At one point in time, the name of our city was pronounced the Spanish way, seeing as it is a Spanish place name gifted by Spanish-speaking people.
But as the story goes, train conductors on the Fort Worth and Denver City Railroad weren’t well versed in yeísmo, that linguistic trick of blending double Ls to make a “yuh” sound. In the late 1880s, as the trains slowed down to drop off passengers in the new town of Amarillo, FW&DC conductors called out the name of the approaching stop in a ’Murican sort of way. It rhymed nicely with pillow and willow (two great words you need to know if you’re writing song lyrics about our hometown).
So that’s why we’re Am-uh-RIL-oh (or Am-uh-RIL-uh) instead of Ah-muh-ree-yoh. Anyway, trains are basically why we’re here to start with. They’re an everyday part of life for the many local folks who live or commute near the tracks. We are a railroad town, but sadly, we can only watch trains pass by because it hasn’t been possible to ride one as a passenger in Am-uh-RIL-uh since 1971.
The first passenger train arrived here in 1887 when there were more cattle than people in the city. If all the moo-ing got to be a bit much, or if the olfactory bulb needed a breather, Amarilloans could take the train northwest to Denver or southeast to Fort Worth. By 1899, the Santa Fe Railroad had joined several segments of line into a continental railroad, and more cities were opened up for rail travel. Finally, the Rock Island came to town in 1903 with passenger service east to Little Rock and Memphis, Tennessee.
For someone who may have shown up here on foot or on the back of a horse over the treacherous trails of the plains, the experience of train travel in the early days must’ve warped the space-time continuum pretty hard. Steak and beans at Jenkins’ Saloon at supper and tea and artichoke sammies at the Brown Palace in Denver for lunch the next day.
Then things got even better. The age of the streamliners arrived in Amarillo on Aug. 23, 1940, with the sleek, diesel-powered Texas Zephyr, the latest and greatest streamliner of the Burlington Route. It traveled the Fort Worth and Denver line and stopped at multiple Texas Panhandle towns.
Streamliner trains were all the rage in the 1930s and 1940s—able to reach unheard of speeds owing to their lightweight aluminum and stainless steel skins and efficient diesel-electric propulsion systems. The Amarillo Daily News reported that a mob of 5,000 people crowded the platform at the depot when this modern marvel made a celebratory run between Fort Worth and Denver.
Herschel Caplan, a Daily News reporter, rode with the invited guests and provided a finely detailed description of everything on board, awed by the 65 miles per hour the train clocked between Memphis (the Texas one) and Clarendon as the engineer made up for time lost to all the festivities along the way.
“Smoothly and swiftly it glided across the great rolling plains and historic cattle trails of the Panhandle, the symbol of a new era of engineering and transportation,” Caplan elocuted in his next-day newspaper account.
The Rock Island was hot on Burlington’s heels with its all-streamlined Choctaw Rocket that launched passengers from Memphis (not the Texas one) to Amarillo in about 17 hours.
That service only lasted about nine years, but the Santa Fe made up for the streamliner deficit in 1954 with the San Francisco Chief, the final word on streamliner comfort and style. The westbound Chief arrived in Amarillo at 9:45 a.m. each day and raced across the American West to its terminus in Oakland in less than 28 hours. (Passengers then had to catch a bus to actually reach San Francisco.) The eastbound train departed daily from Amarillo at 5:50 p.m. and arrived at Dearborn Station in Chicago at 12:20 p.m. the following day.
Passenger trains laid the world at our doorstep, just a short hop away to one of three handsome depots downtown. But by the time passenger travel reached its stylish zenith in Amarillo, the golden age of passenger rail travel had actually passed. Ridership began slipping as more Americans traveled by car over an improving highway system. Then came the jet age—with sophisticated and attractive stewardesses—making things worse for the storied passenger trains that called on Amarillo.
The Texas Zephyr ended its run in 1965, and two years later, the railroads lost their mail contracts, delivering the final blow. Aiming to salvage the nation’s long-distance train network, the U.S. government created the quasi-public Amtrak system in 1970 to take over most of the remaining passenger lines. But Amtrak cut out the Chief in 1971 and left nothing for Amarillo.
Still, there’s a glimmer of hope that this half-century drought could be broken. Last summer, the Federal Railroad Administration revealed proposals for an expanded U.S. passenger rail network that includes a connection between Houston and Denver, some of which would run along the old Texas Zephyr route through Amarillo and the Texas Panhandle. A second passenger route was proposed to run along the Santa Fe tracks through the Panhandle—the path of the old San Francisco Chief.
It was just a preliminary study. But the thought of someday boarding a train in downtown Amarillo does stir a craving for fancy food at the Brown Palace, just a smooth and swift ride north across those rolling plains and dusty cattle trails. We’ll wait and see.
