Southwestern Railroad (New Mexico)  The Southwestern Railroad is a Class III railroad operating since 1990, and consisted of two unconnected railroad sections in New Mexico, with no shared functions. These and a third section in the Texas panhandle and Oklahoma, now closed, all operated separately. Since January 2017, only the Whitewater Division is operated by Southwestern. Southwestern is one of several short-line railroads operated by The Western Group of Ogden, Utah. In 1990 Southwestern acquired AT&SF trackage north and west of Whitewater, NM serving the Phelps Dodge open-pit copper mines at Chino and Tyrone, and the smelter at Hurley. In 1994 an additional 27 miles of line from Whitewater to Peruhill was acquired from the A&TSF, and the Santa Fe’s former Deming Subdivision (60 miles from Rincon to Deming and Peruhill) was acquired from BNSF in 2001. The division’s headquarters are at Deming. Southwestern's primary traffic on this division is copper-related: ore from the mines to adjacent concentrators, and outbound loads of copper anodes, cathodes, and sulfuric acid (a by-product of the refining process) for transhipment via the BNSF at Rincon or the Union Pacific at Deming. Until 2004 loads of copper ore were transported from the mines to the Hurley smelter, which closed in that year. BNSF unit trains also traverse the Rincon to Deming line under trackage rights, taking coal westbound to the Arizona Electric power plant near Cochise, Arizona. By late 1880, the Rio Grande, Mexico and Pacific Railroad (an AT&SF subsidiary) was building a line down the Rio Grande valley toward El Paso. At Rincon the line was split, with a branch going southwest toward Deming, with the goal of joining to the Southern Pacific, which was under construction from the west. The two railroads connected at Deming on March 8, 1881, with the driving of a silver spike to mark the creation of the United States’ second transcontinental railroad. The railroad line northwest from Deming, and its branches above Whitewater, was developed in several stages to serve mines in the vicinity of Silver City:  A 47-mile narrow-gauge railroad, the Silver City, Deming and Pacific Railroad, reached Silver City from Deming in March 1883. Within a year it was acquired by the Santa Fe, which converted the 3-foot gauge line to standard gauge by May 1886.