The Silver Spike

On 12 January 1883, about three miles west of the Pecos River, a rail gang working east from El Paso met a rail gang working west from San Antonio, and Thomas Wentworth Peirce, president of the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio, drove a silver spike to join them. It was a smaller occasion than the golden spike in Utah fourteen years earlier and it is far less remembered, but it mattered more to this corner of Texas, because it is the reason the towns along the line exist at all. Ceremonial spikes were soft metal and worth stealing, and they generally came straight back out once the photographs were taken. What the spike completed was the Sunset Route, running from California to New Orleans: the first line in the United States to reach from the Gulf to the Pacific under a single company's control, and one that stayed open in winter, when the northern transcontinental was fighting the Sierra Nevada with miles of snow sheds. The first through passenger trains left San Francisco and New Orleans on 5 February 1883. There is an oddity worth carrying away from it. The track finished that day was the Loop Line, which dived into the canyons to cross the Pecos at its mouth, and it was abandoned in 1892 when the crossing moved upstream. So the spot where the railroad was completed lies on a piece of railroad that no longer exists. The line running west from the Pecos today is the replacement, still carrying freight a hundred and forty three years later.