The Loop Line

When the railroad first reached the Pecos in 1882 it did not cross where it crosses now. There was no way to carry a track straight over a canyon this deep with the money and the methods available, so the engineers took the trains down into it. The route was called the Loop Line, and it swung south towards the Rio Grande on steep grades, through deep cuts, along ledges where the danger of rockfall was constant, and through two tunnels, the first two bored in Texas, to reach a low bridge near the mouth of the river. Work on the first tunnel began in December 1881 and finished the following July. It was slow and expensive to keep open. In 1892 the company gave up on it, moved the crossing five miles upstream and built a viaduct high enough to ignore the canyon altogether, which cut eleven miles off the run between San Antonio and El Paso. The Loop Line was abandoned where it lay, and for most of a century that is where it stayed. Then in 1969 Amistad Reservoir filled and drowned this stretch of the Pecos valley, including the site of the original bridge. The construction camps above the waterline are on the National Register, their location deliberately withheld. The lower tunnel is half full of reservoir. Boats go through it, water lapping the walls and bats overhead, which means the lake that buried this railroad is also the only reason anyone can get to it.