(The following article by Bill Donovan was posted on the Gallup Independent website on December 16.)
GALLUP, N.M. — The ride on Amtrak between Gallup and Albuquerque is a lot less educational and fun these days.
The reason: The tour guides that have been a fixture on the Gallup-Albuquerque route are no longer there.
Louie Bonaguidi, chairman of the Inter-Tribal Ceremonial Association Board said the organization had to cancel the program and let the guides go because of a long-standing dispute with the Burlington Northern Railroad.
While the Ceremonial has provided for the past 20 years the guide service, the railroad was the one who paid for it.
The guides would go out with the eastbound Amtrak in the morning and along the way talk to people on the train about the areas that were passing by their windows, giving them information about the lore of the Navajos, the Acomas and the Lagunas and adding a dash of the history and culture of the area.
The program was extremely popular with train riders, many of them who would spend the entire Gallup-Albuquerque portion of the route glued to their seat in the observation car where the guides held forth on any and all subjects dealing with this area.
Once the train arrived in Albuquerque – usually about 11 a.m. – the guides were on their own until 4:30 p.m. when they got on the westbound train and shared their expertise with people going from Albuquerque to Gallup.
“The program was good for Gallup,” said Bonaguidi, pointing out that train riders would get a lot of the flavor of Gallup by the guides, resulting in some deciding to come back to this area on their next vacation.
It was also good for the railroad, Bonaguidi said. The guides provided a great deal of good-will for the railroad at not a lot of cost.
Bonaguidi said that the guides were paid only for the time they were on the train. The railroad would reimburse the association for the salary of the guides and the association generally ended up with an extra $600 a month for supervising the program, but in the end, money is what shut it down.
Bonaguidi said that it was difficult to get the railroad to release the money on a regular schedule.
The railroad would pay the Ceremonial six to six months after the initial bill and for an organization that didn’t have a whole lot of extra money, the need to pay the guides every two weeks became a burden.
It would not be uncommon, he said, for the railroad to owe the Ceremonial $35,000 to $40,000 at any given time.
Bonaguidi said the association had notified the railroad that it wanted a new agreement in which the railroad would guarantee that it would pay for the service in a timely fashion.
When the railroad failed to respond to the association’s desire for a new contract, the Association just dropped the program.
Bonaguidi said most of the guides were part-time, working only a couple of days a week; so, it didn’t have a profound effect on their income.
But a lot of people have been asking him about the program since it stopped, and Bonaguidi admitted that he wouldn’t mind seeing it back in operation.
One of the problems the Association has, he said, is that every time the association needs to talk to someone about the program, more often than not it’s a different person who will be calling the shots.
“In the six years I have been at the Ceremonial, we must have dealt with 15 different people,” he said.
This is still the case today. When the Independent tried to find someone who was responsible for the program at Burlington Northern, persons would just shift the reporter from one person to another. No one ever had any comment on the program or its value to the company.
Bonaguidi said he misses the tour guides.
“It always made the trip (between Gallup and Albuquerque) very interesting,” he said. “Every time I went on the trip, I learned something about the area I didn’t know.”