The railroad has always had an important association with Route 66, and this is well illustrated in central Flagstaff. A walk along Santa Fe Avenue (Route 66) shows the influence of the railroad on the city’s development, as every building is oriented toward the iron tracks.As automobiles replaced the train as the country’s primary mode of transportation, the Route 66 corridor paralleling the tracks exerted a similar force on development.The Atlantic and Pacific Railroad laid tracks through Flagstaff and the rest of northern Arizona and New Mexico in the 1880s. After the Santa Fe Railroad’s purchase of the line by 1885, Flagstaff became part of a continuous rail connection between St. Louis and the Pacific Ocean. Constructed after an 1888 fire and now used as offices by the Burlington, Northern, and Santa Fe Railway, the sandstone depot was at the geographic center of Flagstaff’s development.The transportation connection enabled regional industries like lumber, cattle, and sheep to dev...
