The Americas

by Michael Frewston

  However, by 1992, all public railways had closed, although some private lines continued to operate. The passenger operation has recently been revived, and a semblance of public services has been restored.

  Trinidad also had a railway network, stretching some 640 km. Built to Standard gauge, it closed in 1968.

  The Dominican Republic has both public and private railways. The public system is 1067 mm gauge, as are a couple of private sugarcane lines. Other sugarcane lines see gauges of 1435 mm (Standard gauge), 762 mm, and the decidedly odd 558 mm, a gauge like no other. A 22-km long light rail line is supposed to be built in the city of Santiago, funded by FEVE in Spain, but construction has yet to start. It is presumed this will be Standard gauge. The capital city Santo Domingo, the largest city in the Caribbean, already has a two-line Standard gauge light rail metro, which boasts over 100 000 riders a day.

  A number of the other small Caribbean islands, such as Bermuda, St Kitts, Aruba and others, had railways, mostly in connection with sugarcane and logging interests. Most were narrow gauge (usually 1067 mm, 914 mm and 762 mm), but some were also Standard gauge. One or two are still operating as tourist lines.

  (ICELAND)

  Slightly out of sequence, I am going to cover Iceland at this juncture, simply because Iceland doesn’t really fit in anywhere, so here is as good a place any. There really isn’t much to tell!

  While today there are no railways in Iceland, there was once a handful of narrow gauge lines. The most famous was the Reykjavik Harbour Railway, which was to a gauge of 900 mm – an unusual gauge, though not entirely unknown elsewhere (e.g. Lisbon, or the Mar del Plata tramway in Argentina, see above).

  Two other railways are of note. The first is the Korpúlfsstŏir Farm Railway, a 600 mm gauge line to service one of Iceland’s industrial farms. It closed many years ago.

  The other railway was the Kárahnjúkar Light Railway, a line recently built in connection with a hydro-electric power project. The gauge of this is not known, but is likely to be narrow gauge.

  Standard gauge new light rail lines are proposed for Iceland, centred on Reykjavik, and including a line to the main airport. To date no progress has been made in building them, although it is reported that financing is mostly in place.

  NORTH AMERICA

  It is perhaps fitting that the final leg on our odyssey around the world brings us to our last three countries, two of which are collectively probably the most economically significant in the world, though individually each is also significant in other ways.

  The reader will note that I have included Mexico as part of North America rather than Central America, the argument being that its railways are now fairly well integrated with those of the USA. The fact that Mexico is also part of NAFTA – the North American Free Trade Agreement – also points to it being more aligned with its neighbours to the north rather than to the south. Geographically it is probably more Central than North, but I believe the first two criteria outweigh the third.

  The USA has currently the largest route distance of any country in the world, and carries the most freight (though certainly far from the most passengers). Canada on the other hand has the second largest landmass in the world, even though the country was (and still is outside of the major population centres) very sparsely populated. Added together, Canada and the USA encompass the largest rail-based movement of freight in the world, both between the two countries and within them.

  Each of these two countries acquired its railways under very different circumstances, and with very different goals in mind. For the USA, the country was very mindful that it had only relatively recently gained independence from England, which was already much further advanced than the USA was in building railways. Not only that, America’s advancing industrialisation meant that the existing means of transportation – primarily the canal and the stagecoach – were already proving inadequate, and the railway would provide a quantum leap in the ability to move both freight and passengers over big distances.

  Canada, on the other hand, saw the railway as a key component in forging a unified federated country. In fact, a railway linking both ends of the country was called The National Dream, and is referred to as such to this day – a symbol of Canadian national unity. The Trans-Canada railway was a key factor in persuading the province of British Columbia to join and then remain in Confederation. Today in Canada, air travel has – except for tourist operations through the Canadian Rockies, as well as commuter and inter-city traffic in the Toronto-Montreal corridor – displaced the train in respect of Canadian long distance passenger travel.

  In both the USA and in Canada, freight reigns supreme. When passenger train meets freight train, it is the passenger train that has to give way by being shunted into a siding – the opposite to what would normally be the situation in much of the world, especially in Europe. In the case of Mexico, its railways are still transforming themselves into a proper commercially viable system, but again focussed on the movement of freight, not people.

  All three countries also have some other common elements, notably vast distances, exacerbated by relatively low speeds, combined with some of the heaviest and longest trains in the world. In the case of Canada and the USA, both countries’ railways include often inhospitable and difficult country involving crossing the Rockies, as well as extremes of climate ranging from some of the hottest places in the world, such as Death Valley in California in summer, to the coldest, in Northern Canada in winter.

  Combined with the huge amount of business between the three countries (that between the USA and Canada is the largest in the world between any two individual nations), it was inevitable that the three countries would end up with highly integrated and compatible railway systems. But it wasn’t like that in the beginning, especially in terms of railway gauges – in particular, Canada and the USA for most of the 19th century took very different paths in that regard, as we shall soon see.

  For now though, we will start with the story of Mexico’s railways and the gauges they chose, before moving on to the railways of the USA, whose story is one of the more convoluted, especially in terms of settling on a standard railway gauge. It is a story that is similar in many ways – though with ultimately a more satisfactory outcome – to that we saw in Australia (see Part 6).

  MEXICO

  Railways came relatively early to Mexico, though the exact date is unclear – some say the first line appeared in 1842, while other sources state 1857. Either way, what is known is that very first lines were built to 914 mm gauge.

  This was quite logical really at the time – there were plans to connect with the burgeoning 914 mm narrow gauge system in the USA to the north (see below), while there was also the potential to connect with Guatemala’s similar gauged system to the south. By 1875, the Corpus Christi, San Diego and Rio Grande Railway in the USA had reached the border with Mexico with its 914 mm gauge network. The first actual connection between US and Mexican railways was in 1883, when the Texas Mexican Railway bridged the Rio Grande River.

  In 1887, Mexico, governed then by President Porfirio Diaz, decided to completely modernise the whole country’s railways, converting them to 1435 mm Standard gauge in the process. The Tex-Mex Railway was converted in 1902. From just a few hundred kilometres at the beginning of the 1890s, the country boasted over 25 000 km of route distance by 1910, and now all to Standard gauge. The prime purpose behind such a huge expansion was to facilitate the export of agricultural products, as well as some minerals, north to the USA.

  In the decade from 1910 to 1920, during the Mexican revolution, the railway was used to move troops around under the direction of Pancho Villa.

  In the late 1880s, the Mexican Central Railway was purchased by the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad, who essentially transposed their American standards and operating procedures into their new purchase. Thus were Mexico’s railways slowly integrated with those of the USA. Other junctions with USA railways appeared throughout the end of the 19th century and t
hroughout the 20th, further integrating the two countries’ railway systems.

  One of the unintended outcomes of these railways reaching ever farther north was that they permitted mass migration, not only within Mexico itself, but over the border into the USA, until the USA clamped down on ‘economic refugees’ escaping Mexico’s relative poverty for a better life north of the border. These immigrants, many illegal, usually entered via El Paso, Texas, in the first three decades of the 20th century. After 1927, new links were established with American railways at Nogales on the Mexico-US border, some 2300 km north of Mexico City, permitting even more migration, especially into California and Arizona.

  But not all of Mexico’s railways were linked with or dependent on the USA. Up until the 1970s (and even into the 1980s, although abandonment started in the 1960s), there was an extensive system of electrified interurban lines, all to 1435 mm Standard gauge. Radiating out from Mexico City, they encompassed a total of over 200 km.

  Main-line railways:

  Today’s railways in Mexico are almost totally directed towards the movement of freight, with virtually no main-line passenger services left. What passenger services remain are primarily directed towards the tourist.

  The freight trains are essentially an extension of those in the USA, with trains moving freely across the border. Track gauge, signalling, motive power and rolling stock are all identical to those north of the border.

  A high speed rail service has been proposed, to run the 210 km between Mexico City and Querétaro, with 300 km/h trains. Although fully tendered in 2014, with a consortium headed by the Chinese as winners, construction was indefinitely suspended following a bribery and corruption investigation. Since then, with a drop in the price of oil (a major contributor to the Mexican economy), the future of this line remains further in doubt. An additional line, from Monterrey over the US border to San Antonio in Texas, is planned (including customs procedures conducted in each terminus), but again nothing is likely to happen for some time, if ever.

  Narrow gauge:

  There weren’t too many conventional narrow gauge railways in Mexico – but there was a large network of 500 mm gauge horse-drawn railways, using small four-wheel trucks, that linked a huge area of haciendas (farms) producing sisal hemp in the 1920s. Few survive today, and those that do (still horse-drawn) cater solely to tourists.

  Trams and metros:

  Mexico City is the world’s second largest city, with 18 million people, yet for many years it was not very well served at all when it comes to rail-based transportation, with just a couple of commuter lines and a small tram network. However, a huge expansion program has been under way to rectify these shortcomings.

  The current Mexico City metro, which was rebuilt from a previous rail system, is to Standard gauge. It consists of 12 lines, of which two (the most recent) are conventional Standard gauge steel wheel on steel rail, and the remaining ten are rubber-tyred. The inside steel guide rails are set to Standard gauge.

  The total route length amounts to some 227 km, with a daily ridership of over 4.6 million – the second highest in North America. In addition, there is the Ferrocarril Suburbano commuter rail line, dating from 2008. As with the metro, it is to Standard gauge.

  Mexico City’s tram system, quite separate from its metro, dates from 1858, virtually the dawn of railways in the country, and is to 1435 mm gauge. It was of course originally horse-drawn.

  Later in its history it used old North American streetcars (especially PCC cars purchased from Minneapolis and Detroit). Today, new vehicles are currently being procured in an effort to modernise it into a light rail network, named as the Xochimilco Light Rail, and encompassing the main airport.

  Modern metros are also to be found in Guadalajara (which is actually a far larger system than that in Mexico City) and Monterrey. All are to Standard gauge, and those in these two cities are as much surface light rail systems as proper metros – they use tram-like vehicles in two- or three-car trains, with overhead catenary, yet run on grade-separated rights-of-way.

  USA

  Even today, in spite of the rapid rise of China economically over the last couple of decades, the USA is still by far the largest nation in terms of GDP (gross domestic product). The USA is also a nation that prides itself on being different – often, it has to be said, just for the sake of being different. It is colloquially known as American ‘exceptionalism’.

  While being ‘exceptional’ (in this context) can mean being better, it can just as easily mean being worse. In the case of the USA’s railways, this exceptionalism, just as occurred later in Australia, meant that the country suffered considerably in its development of a unified railway system, and this was primarily due to the fact that all too often different railways chose different gauges during the country’s earlier years of railway development.

  The reasons for choosing various gauges were usually little to do with technical superiority – as opposed to the case when I K Brunel chose the 2140 mm broad gauge for his railways in Britain – but more to do with the fact that the still developing USA was yet a deeply divided nation. The choice of a railway gauge was more a position of staking your claim in your part of the country – to the exclusion of anyone else – rather than making your railways run better. If you chose a gauge that was different from your neighbour (or competitor) in the next state, especially if he was also your enemy, so much the better. And if that gauge difference prevented him from running his trains over your tracks, then better still. It of course meant that you couldn’t run your trains over his tracks – something that seems to have escaped the attention of the railway pioneers at the time, but which they (and the country as a whole) came to rue in later years.

  First Railways:

  The history of the USA’s railway gauges in the early days is easily as convoluted and complex as that we saw in Australia – maybe even more so. It will be virtually impossible to cover every aspect of this history in this Part – huge 500-page volumes have been written in the past on this subject, and even then they probably missed a few things here and there. What I will try to do is distil this down to something more manageable, yet still encompass all the key aspects of the vivid story of America’s railway gauge history. Even so, I know that I can only touch upon this subject at a relatively superficial level.

  It is quite well known that most of the first railways in America were essentially British in origin, imported barely a handful of years after railways first appeared on the eastern side of the Atlantic Ocean, and using steam motive power imported from Stephenson in England. Yet what is claimed as the very first railway in America was actually ‘home-grown’. The Granite Railroad was built between Quincy and Milton, MA (and today part of greater Boston).

  It got its name from the granite used in the construction of its tracks, although initially it used wood rails with iron plates on them. It is recorded that these rails were 5 ft 0 in (1524 mm) apart. The railway also claimed to use the world’s first operating switch with a frog, although this is doubtful – such features were already part of Britain’s railways in the early 1820s (see Parts 1 and 2).

  However, this railway was only ever horse-drawn – which meant that steam power supplied by Stephenson in England was never seen on these rails. For that reason, the gauge of 1524 mm remained – at least at this juncture in America’s railway history – unique. When you think about it, if locomotives from Stephenson in England had been used – re-gauged to 1524 mm – this could have completely changed the face of the world’s railway map as we know it today.

  Instead, other railways appeared at about this time or very soon after, and they were initially built to 1435 mm Stephenson gauge, using locomotives imported from Stephenson in England. The prime reason of course was that the USA in the mid to late 1820s had little industrial capacity or engineering capability of its own, certainly not on the scale of that already existing in Britain. Nor had the USA the necessary expertise in the field of steam power. The only way that rai
lways could be built and operated in very short order – which many wanted in order to build new businesses – was to import them wholesale from the ‘old country’.

  Considering that America must have still harboured feelings of something less than friendship towards England (the 1820s were only about fifty years after the Declaration of Independence), this probably caused a bit of handwringing in more than a few pioneering railway boardrooms. Nonetheless, this was the only way that the quick appearance of operational railways in America was going to be achieved, and so no doubt much pride had to be swallowed and many noses held in the process.

  But there were other reasons for choosing British railway building resources as well. For example, it is not well known that Britain’s famous railway pioneer and engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, was born of Marc Isambard Brunel and Sarah Kingdom (from whence he got his name). While Brunel’s mother was British, his father was an American engineer, and, although Isambard the son was British, he visited America and helped bring British engineering technology – especially that of the railway – over to the ‘new world’.

  Notwithstanding his later establishment of his broad gauge back in his own country, Brunel was one of the early instigators of Stephenson’s Standard gauge in the USA. As a result, almost all of the first railways in America used Stephenson’s locomotives, these being, at the time, by far the best available. As all these locomotives were to 1435 mm Stephenson gauge – or something very close to it (the precise dimensions of this gauge were still in the throes of being established in England, see Part 1) – it would seem natural that all the new steam-powered railway building in the USA would also be to Stephenson gauge.

  Indeed, the first railways did use Stephenson’s gauge. The Delaware and Hudson Canal Company (D&H, and one of the very first railway builders in America), the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the Baltimore and Ohio Railway, as well as a number of others, all imported raw materials (especially iron), finished locomotives and expertise from England. In particular, Stephenson’s Planet-class locomotives (first used on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway) were both successful and popular running on tracks on the west side of the Atlantic, and most of the early railway companies bought them.