The scenery is flat desert.  However, the tracks are sometimes separated by some distance, so photographs of freight trains is possible.

I took the opportunity to walk south to the Lead and Coal Street bridges for some "above" shots of the Southwest Chief.

SANTA FE – The man behind a spectacular renovation of one of the historic Harvey House hotels, those railroad way stations that opened the door for tourism in the Southwest, may soon work his magic on the long- forlorn La Castaneda Hotel in Las Vegas, N.M.

“I am in escrow to purchase the Castaneda” with 60 days to close, said Allan Affeldt, who transformed and reopened La Posada Hotel in Winslow, Ariz.

AFFELDT: Has until April 8 to close hotel purchase

“I am guardedly optimistic; it’s very complicated because the building has to be rebuilt,” Affeldt said in a telephone interview Thursday.

The Mission Revival style Las Vegas hotel, completed in 1898 and the first built by Fred Harvey – and which hosted Teddy Roosevelt’s first reunion of his Spanish-American War Rough Rider troops the next year – has not operated for about four decades, although its bar is open.

Affeldt said that refurbishing could be transformative for Las Vegas and the state. “I think that (opening the hotel) would be a really huge thing not only for Las Vegas but for tourism in New Mexico in general,” he said.

Las Vegas City Manager Tim Dodge has met with Affeldt and believes if the plan goes through it would be a big boost for the local economy.

“Las Vegas is a community that is still underdeveloped and under-recognized,” Dodge said.

Affeldt “is in it because he has a passion for restoring historic buildings,” Dodge added.

Affeldt has met other challenges following his days as a racquetball-playing philosophy student at the University of California at Irvine. In 1988, he undertook a peace march across Russia at age 28 and there met his wife, artist Tina Mion, his only partner in the Castaneda project. He also produced the first stadium concert in Russia in 1987 with the late music impresario Bill Graham, was mayor of Winslow for two and a half years and has been a candidate for Congress in Arizona.

He seems undaunted by the Castaneda project even though the 25,000-square-foot Las Vegas property is in worse condition than La Posada was when he bought it in 1994. “This is going to be years of work,” he said. He reportedly spent $12 million on his Winslow project.

Although Las Vegas has historic cachet, it lacks infrastructure and tourism “anchors,” Affeldt said. A renovated Castaneda “would be catalytic for Las Vegas with its historic buildings and its amazing downtown,” he said.

Stephen Fried, who wrote “Appetite for America,” about how immigrant Fred Harvey built a hospitality empire that helped civilize the West, spent time in Las Vegas researching his book.

For the people of Las Vegas, this “is a level of wish fulfillment you can’t even believe,” he said Thursday. Matching what was done with La Posada in Winslow “is something the people of Las Vegas have been praying for for years,” he added.

Santa Fe’s DeAnne Ottoway of Sotheby’s has been the listing agent for La Castaneda for five years. It was put on the market about 10 years ago by a Las Vegas couple who’d owned it for a long time, she said. The hotel was listed for sale by Sotheby’s for $450,000, although Ottoway said she was prohibited from disclosing the selling price.

Of Affeldt, she said, “He knows what he is doing. It’s a great property.”
The empty La Castaneda hotel on Railroad Avenue in Las Vegas, N.M., may have better days ahead if Allan Affeldt, who restored a sister hotel in Winslow, Ariz., completes his planned purchase of the Las Vegas property. (Eddie Moore/Albuquerque Journal)

The empty La Castaneda hotel on Railroad Avenue in Las Vegas, N.M., may have better days ahead if Allan Affeldt, who restored a sister hotel in Winslow, Ariz., completes his planned purchase of the Las Vegas property. (Eddie Moore/Albuquerque Journal)

The hotel on Railroad Avenue “sits a few miles from Route 66, but has become a common side trip for travelers exploring the 1926-37 alignment of the old road that looped to Santa Fe,” the route66news website says.

Affeldt posted a “selfie” photo on his Facebook page on Wednesday calling the hotel “one of the loveliest and most famous in the Southwest,” adding he had until April 8 to close his latest hotel purchase “and ponder my sanity.”

Others in Las Vegas are also excited. “It’s a vacant, historic building that needs to be restored,”said Cindy Collins, executive director of Main Street de Las Vegas, a nonprofit intended to develop the city economically through historic preservation.

“Allan Affeldt is the perfect person to restore this building because he has proven it with the restoration of La Posada,” Collins said. “La Posada is the sister hotel to La Castaneda. They are sister buildings on the National Register of Historic Places.”

“The Castaneda is just as beautiful and is dying and need of renovation,” she added.

Affeldt purchased La Posada in complicated negotiations with the Santa Fe Railway after he visited it and, with his artist wife Mion, helped local preservationists save it. La Posada, where you can dine on classic period dishes in the Turquoise Room restaurant and fall asleep to the midnight lullaby of passing trains horns, was voted the 7th best hotel in the Southwest by readers of Conde Nast magazine.

Affeldt is probably the only person in the country who could pull off a similar transformation in Las Vegas, said author and Harvey expert Fried.

“He and his wife are brilliant at this stuff.”

(L to R) LeAnna Lewis, Skylar Roades, and LeAnn's sister Trudy Gamblin and LeAnn's niece Roslyn from Beaufort, South Carolina, waved as we passed the overlook.  (Names with permission from LeAnna)

Trails & Rails Interpretors, Kandace and Robert Tabern, boarded in La Plata after their overnight at the Depot Inn and Suites.  They present the Trails and Rails program between Chicago and La Plata, westbound one day, eastbound the next. Other docents work on other days.  While they were presenting, Wiley Drake was conducting his live radio show, "Congregational Prayer Conference of Washington, DC."  Robert and Kandace have written the 252 page rail guide for this segment of the Southwest Chief route called, "Outside the Rails"  ISBN  978-1-312-03773-1 available at outsidetherails.com.  Robert is also a Field Reporter for TrainWeb.com and he has a report called, "An Introduction to Trails & Rails - How the National Park Service and Amtrak Partnership Began", click the title to view that report.

The Trails & Rails program is always held in the sightseer/lounge car.  An all-train announcement it made about the program's beginning in the lounge, then the interpretors use their own PA system in the lounge.