At the same time every day Scott Parkinson walks out of his office at the San Pedro & Southwestern Railroad with an orange construction flag in an effort to keep people from running into his train when it’s crossing the road.

He walks on the sharp chunks of grey roadbed ballast to a railroad crossing just a few hundred feet away from his office. The crossing has those old white wooden railroad signs from back in the day. Next to them are modern stop signs planted near the roadway with metal posts.

“I have to help my guys out. People tend to drive past our stops signs at the railroad crossing,” said Parkinson, who is the general manager for the railroad.  “We don’t have a flashing crossing and the stop signs don’t seem to help.”

The San Pedro & Southwestern Railroad — located at 796 E. Country Club Drive in Benson — has been serving local businesses in Benson for decades, but it used to stretch those iron rails all the way to the Mexico border town of Douglas. Today the railroad has seven and a half miles of track that feed their main customer, Apache Nitrogen Products in Benson, Parkinson said. 

The railroad frequently pushes freight cars, which means the locomotives are in the rear. It can be difficult for the engineer and crew to see cars crossing the tracks simply because many are not aware that the railroad is still operating, Parkinson said.

“(The railroad has) been operating nonstop forever and it’s still going,” Parkinson said. “I’m looking to expand into other operations.”

The railroad has a whopping six employees who are all dedicated to making the SPSR a booming operation in this town. All of the staff, with exception to the office manager, spilt up the work equally. Every employee including Parkinson operates the locomotive, inspects the equipment, writes orders and helps with track maintenance, Parkinson said.

“We do the final mile,” Parkinson said. “We do the stuff that the big railroads don’t want to do.”

The big railroads Parkinson is referring to is the Class I railroads like Union Pacific or BNSF Railway. The SPSR is what is called a short line operation or Class III. This is where the bigger railroads drop off cars to the smaller railroads whose job is to take them to the plants and factories to load them and then take the cars back to the big railroad for nationwide delivery, Parkinson said.

The SPSR provides a Transload service in Benson where railroad can pump product out of tank cars and transfer it to big-rig trucks that will take the product out for delivery for customers without rail service, Parkinson said.

“We may not be as long as those other guys (Class I) but we are every bit as wide,” Parkinson said, referring to the amount of rules and regulations that are identical from class to class.

The advantage of a short line feeding a business is that the customer service is more personal. There are lots of places around the area that have had bad experiences with the railroad because the customers didn’t know whom to contact, Parkinson said.

“Big railroads haven’t been known to predict and meet delivery deadlines, mainly because it was a call center setup,” Parkinson said.

The SPSR has a locomotive they keep in Willcox where they provide railcar service and Transload to customers in that area. The operation there is completed with one man using a remote control pack so he can be on the ground doing tasks and operating the train on the ground, Parkinson said.

“We have proved that you can build big business by paying attention to customers and being responsible on the railroad,” Parkinson said. “Our Willcox operation is up to 500 cars per year.”

The SPSR has been operating since the 1880s but has gone through many sections of abandonment and changed ownership between several companies over the decades. In November 2003 the Parkinson family took ownership of the SPSR through ARG Trans Investment Company that Scott Parkinson and his father David Parkinson manage.

“When we took over the SPSR, our primary goal was to continue operating in hopes of expanding service in Cochise County and to re-open an international connection with a Mexico railroad at Naco,” Parkinson said.

Currently there is an international connection at Nogales, which is operated by Union Pacific that ties into Tucson directly. The SPSR wanted to open another connection that would provide Union Pacific with a relief branch at Benson. That plan never surfaced and the 60 miles of track from Curtiss to Bisbee was pulled up, Parkinson said.

“It has not been formerly abandoned, the tracks and material were salvaged,” Parkinson said. “It is still considered a railroad corridor.”

When it’s decided to officially abandon the route, other groups can move in and buy the land or whatever is available to buy, Parkinson said.

“We have had a number of people interested in a trail system,” Parkinson said. “The vehicle out there for a ‘rails-to-trails’ wouldn’t be us. It would be some other organization.”