El Paso.
Roads through the mountains.

El Paso’s mountain pass and border

El Paso sits where the Franklin Mountains, the Rio Grande and the route north from Mexico all meet. The old Camino Real passed through this natural gate on its way toward Santa Fe, and those mountains and the river still shape where roads can go. I-10 squeezes through the city with mountains close by. Loop 375 climbs over Trans-Mountain Road. Paisano Drive and the Border Highway run close enough to the river that the border is part of the drive itself.

Railroads changed El Paso in the 1880s

El Paso’s transportation history started long before freeways. Railroads arrived in 1881 and 1882, bringing national rail connections to a small adobe town. The city grew rapidly as businesses and new residents arrived. Fort Bliss and cross-border commerce also helped shape its development. By the time motorists began traveling across Texas, El Paso was already a place where travelers, goods and military traffic converged. Highways would give that established transportation center a new way to grow.

From the Bankhead Highway to I-10

The early highway era kept that pattern going. The Bankhead Highway, one of the nation’s early transcontinental roads, crossed Texas to El Paso and roughly followed routes later known as US 67 and US 80. The present freeway system changed the scale. I-10 became the big east-west carrier. US 54 reached north from downtown as the Patriot Freeway. Loop 375 tied together the mountain road, the eastern side of the city and the border. You can follow these changes through the archive’s El Paso historic photographs, then compare them with the later road collections above.

Roads between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez

The 1963 Chamizal agreement called for a new Rio Grande channel to settle a longstanding boundary dispute. It also required replacement bridges: changing the boundary meant changing how people crossed it. Today, the City of El Paso manages the Paso Del Norte, Stanton and Zaragoza crossings, connecting the two cities for daily travel and commerce. That is the practical side of being paired with Ciudad Juárez: work, family, freight, school, shopping and appointments do not stop at a line on a map.

Recent projects keep returning to the same constraints. The Border West Expressway opened in 2019 along Loop 375 from east of downtown toward Racetrack Drive, giving westside and downtown traffic another controlled-access route. The mountains still make an east-west trip across town a choice between going over them or around them. Along the river, local trips share a narrow corridor with international crossings and longer journeys through the Southwest. That combination gives El Paso’s freeway photographs a setting you won’t mistake for Dallas or Houston.