Ferrocaril Ibarra - San Lorenzo, Ecuador (1994)

This was a super scenic but unfortunate and short lived railway line that connected the highlands of the Andes with the Pacific coast in the North of Ecuador. Challenging landscape, damaging storms & financial problems meant the line took decades to build in the first place and was shut down for good a few years after my trip after suffering damage in the El Nino storms of the late 1990s. At the time, there was no road connection to the coastal town of San Lorenzo. (There is a road now, and the railway is history). The journey passes through a great variety of landscapes and flora. Even people looked different, from mostly mestizo (mix of indigenous and hispanic) in the highlands to predominantly black as one approaches the coast.
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A Brief History
In the middle of the 19th century, international trade, and particularly cacao exportation, became increasingly important to the Ecuadorian economy, necessitating a power shift from regional oligarchies to a central oligarchy capable of developing a nation-wide infrastructure. García Moreno, a traditional elite and landholder from Ecuador’s highlands, consolidated power by espousing a program favoring centralization and modernization. A central railroad connecting Guayaquil, the country’s largest port, and Quito was the backbone of Moreno’s plan. This stretch of the rail system became known as the “Southern Railway”.

Political wrangling and deceit tainted the promise of the central railroad throughout its tumultuous history. The vicissitudes of the 36-year campaign to build the Southern Railway began in earnest with the death of the man who conceived it. In August 1875, less than three years after the start of construction, political opponents assassinated Moreno on the steps of the presidential palace. Over the next four decades, the Southern Railway claimed many more lives, including Eloy Alfaro, the president credited with completing it. Rightist thugs sent by the opposition captured Alfaro and a group of his supporters, transported them to Quito on the train, and turned them over to an angry mob. Aside from the deaths of two presidents, the arduous task of linking the coast with the capital killed at least two thousand indigenous and Jamaican workers.

The completion of the Southern Railway did not accelerate the building of the rest of the railroad as many had hoped. In fact, the construction of the 373-kilometer Northern Railway between Quito and San Lorenzo and the 110-kilometers of track from Sibambe to Cuenca, Ecuador’s third largest city, took almost twice as long to build, 57 years, as the 464-kilometer line from Guayaquil to Quito. Continued political rancor and a mounting external debt were the principal causes of the construction delays. The Sibambe-Cuenca section was the last to be inaugurated in 1965.

The complete rail system survived less than 10 years. Throughout the 1970s the government discontinued most of the secondary lines because it lacked the funds necessary for repairing them. Flooding and mudslides regularly consumed many branches of the railroad and, eventually, even closed the main southern and northern lines. Trains ran the Guayaquil-Quito and Quito-San Lorenzo routes until 1998, when El Niño destroyed large sections of the tracks.

Source: www.ecuadorexplorer.com/html/train.html

Taken on: March 10, 2011

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Sets appears in: • Recuerdos Peruanos y Andinos

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