[10] In 1878 the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway reached Trinidad, making it easier for goods to be shipped from distant locations.

[11] In the 1880s Trinidad became home to a number of well-known people, including Bat Masterson, who briefly served as the town's marshal in 1882.

[16] During the same time, Trinidad was home to a popular semiprofessional baseball team that was briefly coached by Damon Runyon.

[17][18] On August 7, 1902, the Bowen Town coal mine, six miles north of Trinidad, experienced a horrific gas explosion, killing 13 miners.

[21] In late September, the Trinidad area and the region along the Purgatoire River endured an unusually heavy rainstorm, leading to severe flooding; the flood destroyed the Santa Fe railroad station, wiped out every bridge in town, and caused several hundred thousand dollars' worth of property damage.

[22] As Trinidad continued to grow, a number of new construction projects began in the downtown area, including a new library, a new city hall, an opera house, and a new hotel.

In 1969 a local social worker asked him to perform the surgery for her, which he learned by consulting diagrams and a New York surgeon.

At his peak he averaged four sex-change operations a day, and the term "taking a trip to Trinidad" became a euphemism for some seeking the procedures he offered.

In 1995, Claudine Griggs published Passage through Trinidad: Journal of a Surgical Sex Change about her experience with Biber.

[26] Biber was featured in an episode of South Park, in which elementary school teacher Mr. Garrison undergoes a sex-change operation.

[27] Drop City, a counterculture artists' community, was formed in 1965 on land about 4 mi (6.4 km) north of Trinidad.

North Avenue leads to a rut-prone county road to the top of Simpson's Rest for overviews of the city.

The vista from Simpson's Rest includes Fishers Peak, a prominent mountain of 9,600 ft (2,900 m) in elevation, southeast of the city.

For many years Trinidad housed the miners who worked in the coal mines of the Raton Basin south and west of the town.

The mines are now closed, but since the 1980s companies have been drilling new gas wells to extract coalbed methane from the remaining coal seams.

[citation needed] Later that century the town saw swings of boom and bust as the oil industry heated and cooled.