Wheels Museum

The Wheels Museum occupies part of the former Santa Fe Railway Shops in Albuquerque's Barelas neighborhood, a complex whose rail history reaches back to the 1880s, when shops and a roundhouse first rose on the site after Albuquerque became the division point between the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway and the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad. The Santa Fe absorbed the A&P in 1902 and began modernizing the facility in 1912; the eighteen surviving buildings, including the vast 1921 erection and machine shop, date from 1915 to 1925. In their prime the shops were Albuquerque's largest employer — 970 workers in 1919 and a peak of about 1,500 in the 1940s — rebuilding steam locomotives at a rate of roughly 40 complete overhauls a month. Work tapered off in the 1950s as the Santa Fe dieselized, though maintenance-of-way equipment repair continued into the 1980s. The City of Albuquerque bought the complex in 2007 for $8.5 million, and the site joined the National Register of Historic Places in 2014, the same era the weekly Rail Yards Market began operating in the restored Blacksmith Shop. A transportation museum — the Wheels Museum — has been among the leading reuse plans for the historic railyard, and today the museum interprets this heritage with rolling stock, locomotive parts, and model trains.