ABOARD THE SOUTHWEST CHIEF — Along a blustery section of rural Kansas farmland some 60 miles east of Colorado, a small army of railroad workers last week laid Pueblo steel as part of a project to keep a pillar of the Southwest’s history alive.

The men, caked in dirt and clad in orange safety vests, were replacing a swath of 65-year-old track that was threatening to shutter Amtrak’s Southwest Chief route established before the turn of the century.

“If that rail doesn’t get fixed, that train doesn’t go through Lamar,” said Matt Allen, whose work as city manager in Garden City, Kan., helped secure funding for the track’s rehabilitation. “If that rail doesn’t get fixed, that train doesn’t run through La Junta.”

A group of small, sleepy towns in Kansas, Colorado and New Mexico banded together in the past three years after Amtrak warned it might be forced to end the Chief’s iconic service through their communities.

Needing roughly $200 million for miles of track repairs on Burlington Northern Santa Fe’s line, officials were plotting to reroute the beloved Chicago-to-Los Angeles train into Oklahoma and Texas.

With BNSF reluctant to pay for the rail fixes since their freighters lumber along at lower speeds and don’t use some of the track, the prospects for saving the Chief — described by one official as “pushing a rock up a hill” — seemed insurmountable.

But towns that never before interacted, such as Trinidad, Dodge City, Kan., and Lamy, N.M., began pressing their state governments, digging into their pockets and applying for millions of federal grant dollars to prevent the line from leaving for better track.

After several failed fundraising tries, their efforts miraculously worked.

A $15 million federal grant was awarded to the initiative in late October, the second such grant in two years, meaning the train will keep rumbling through the foreseeable future. More than $50 million has been gathered to date thanks also to state and local matching efforts, and BNSF has agreed to cover much of the maintenance costs.

Millions are still needed to complete the repairs, and work on the line will continue for the next several years. But officials feel confident they will be able to secure the rest of the money.

“Other than a situation like this, you’d probably never get all these towns to talk and work together,” Lynn Horner, La Junta’s mayor, said Thursday while across the road from the town’s Amtrak stop.

Grateful passengers

The 126 passengers aboard the Chief on Thursday as it sped from Kansas into Colorado were grateful the route has been saved. Riders included an Illinois bassist practicing in his coach seat, a first-time train traveler from Chicago en route to California and a Phoenix-bound Amish couple for whom the train is their only mode of long-distance travel.

“It’s the main connection between me and my daughter in Topeka,” said 86-year-old Bernice Carlock of La Junta as she kneeled on a seat to make conversation with the couple sitting behind her. “We’re both widows now.”

Carlock still rides the route for free thanks to her husband’s 44-year railroad career and says the cross-county train holds a special place in her heart.

“It’s reassuring,” she said of the Chief’s newfound security, adding that without the line, she was considering moving to be closer to her daughter.

Socorro Fierro, a frequent passenger on her way from Chicago to Albuquerque with her young son, watched the sunrise Thursday out a back window on the train’s last car. Other travelers draped in fleece blankets slumbered in coach seats nearby, a few of them snoring over the clicks and clacks of the rail.

“It’s like family to me, really,” Fierro said, her face glowing as the sun’s light passed into the rail car. “It’s like my (train), my people.”

Train ridership in the United States has been climbing steadily during the past 20 years, including on the Chief, which sees about 350,000 travelers every 12 months. In 2014, the route broke a record with 367,267 passengers.

Experts say Amtrak’s influence in rural communities is mammoth, acting as an advertising tool, a commercial hub and an economic stimulus that reaches over a 70-mile radius at every stop.

“Many of the smaller communities, this is their only means of public transportation,” said Simon Cordery, a history professor at Western Illinois University who studies railroads. “There’s no air service, (and) Greyhound bus service is a skeleton of what it used to be.”

Cordery said trains are becoming a more significant way of travel in rural areas. People who don’t use the railroad, he says, don’t understand the service’s importance because it’s outside their scope of experience.

“The importance of a train is the places where people get on along the way,” Cordery said.

Some of the stops that were at risk of losing the line also serve as home bases for Amtrak crews, embedding the Chief even further into the local economy.

In La Junta, for instance, a crew of nine — including employees who live in Colorado Springs and Denver — won’t have to be relocated thanks to money raised to halt the train’s rerouting.

“It has kept quite a few jobs in La Junta,” said Marcelino Martinez, a Southwest Chief conductor who lives in Rocky Ford. “It’s hometown for me.”

Threat averted

The alternate route proposed for the Chief would have taken the train onto Burlington Northern Santa Fe’s busy transcontinental superhighway track to the south. Observers believe the cost of implementing the new infrastructure would have meant the end of the line altogether and the potential loss of Amtrak jobs.

Amtrak’s former Pioneer and Desert Wind routes, which connected Denver to the West Coast, ended in 1997, when states served by the trains declined to pay for the routes after congressional funding dried up.

“A little bit of me will die,” John Anderson, a conductor on the Pioneer, told The Denver Post in May 1997 during the train’s last ride.

Rural areas along the routes were devastated by the loss of the trains, said Marc Magliari, an Amtrak spokesman, and in some communities people showed up en masse to say goodbye.

“When you lose the service, it’s incredibly expensive to bring it back,” Magliari said. “And usually it doesn’t come back.”

The secluded stops in Kansas, Colorado and New Mexico — once at risk of losing their “lifeline to the outside world,” as one man put it — are now working to embrace the future of the Chief. Lamar and La Junta see the train as a centerpiece in their planning for the future.

La Junta officials are weighing building a $1.5 million rail station.

“We wouldn’t be here without the train,” said Melissa McCoy, project coordinator in historic Dodge City, Kan., where their stop was in jeopardy.

The Chief’s survival is also felt beyond the towns where it passes through. The 11,000 tons of new track being laid is from Evraz’s massive Pueblo steel mill, and plans are in the works to add more Colorado stops on the route.

“There’s this exponential impact on the community,” said Sal Pace, a Pueblo County commissioner who heads up Colorado’s legislative efforts to protect and expand the line.

Pace said he hopes the train can one day help link the Front Range to southeast Colorado and beyond.

“We’re not swinging the same big stick that Denver is,” said John Sutherland, city administrator of Lamar, where the Chief passes through twice a day. “But we’ve got enough voice now for people to say, ‘Hey, there is something going on here.’ ”

Jesse Paul: 303-954-1733, jpaul@denverpost.com or @JesseAPaul

The issue

Roughly three years ago, Amtrak announced it was considering rerouting the Southwest Chief into Oklahoma and Texas because of roughly $200 million needed in track repairs through Kansas, Colorado and New Mexico. Old rail was slowing the line down between Kansas and Colorado and Burlington Northern Santa Fe, which owns the route, was reluctant to spend money for repairs.

Stops protected

– Hutchinson, Kan.

– Dodge City, Kan.

– Garden City, Kan.

– Lamar

– La Junta

– Trinidad

– Raton, N.M.

– Las Vegas N.M.

– Lamy, N.M.