Great adventure: Mexico railroads
© Sergio Wheeler, 2012
Hear that whistle blowing? The train is coming. Dogs bark. Chickens scurry for safety. Children watch in awe and wonder where the big engine has been and where is it going. They try to keep count of the cars and cars and cars. The train rolls on until it is finally out of sight. Interesting dreams go with it.
In the flatlands of Jalisco, near enough to Sayula, a long freight train was working its way from a side track to the main line, destined, no doubt, for Guadalajara and perhaps beyond. We thought of old friend Ray Morrison, a shrewd, little man, and his role a generation ago in the railroad industry.
Ray purchased surplus cars in the United States for almost nothing and sold them in Mexico for a pretty peso profit. It wasn't in his obit but Ray thought of himself as a minor environmental do-gooder. He reduced rust.
Sellers and buyers thought Ray was doing them a favor. He was rewarded with bonus kindness. That's how it is, sometimes, when you deal with the elite. Back then, there were no paupers in the railroad business.
Ray found the Mexicans more interesting. He chose to live in Mexico for 30 years or more. He learned a lot of history and enjoyed some great adventure stories.
As Ray told it, Mexico got interested in railroads in the middle 1800s. This being Mexico, it took a while to lay track.
The first segment, 11 kilometers, was between Molino and Veracruz. Nineteen years later, Mexico City was connected to Puebla. Veracruz got tied in with the capital in 1873.
Foreign investment, mostly by Americans and Brits, millions when that was something more than a string of zeros, stimulated expansion. Ray had some good stories about compulsory, unpaid construction labor.
It seems railroad interests were able to persuade judges to sentence convicted criminals to carrying crossties and pounding spikes with sledgehammers instead of going to prison. Others who helped build railroads were exempted from military service. Of course locals got involved for minimum pay. Politicians were a factor. Some villages offered free land for stations. That and mountain passes seemed to affect route decisions.
Interesting tale about how the ambitious Escandon brothers won the support of the Catholic church. They built a little five-kilometer link between Mexico City and the Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe, hauled in a locomotive piece by piece, assembled it on the spot and were richly blessed.
Once the trains were really rolling, business picked up all around. An industrious lad could sell a stack of firewood, two meters by two meters by two-thirds of one, for 1.75 pesos. Another could use his burro to haul water to resupply thirsty steam engines. Track maintenance was labor intensive, a royal pain in the south. Heavy rains caused washouts and mudslides.
Ray chuckled at some of the stuff he read or heard: "The introduction of railways into Mexico has roused the people from their centuries of lethargy." "In Mexico the railroad has wrought a marvelous transformation in the social and material aspect of the republic." "At the strident whistle of the locomotive crossing many parts of its territory, the nation has awakened from its long sleep."
Pure baloney, said Morrison, or at least grossly exaggerated. He always found Mexicans willing to work if there were jobs.
As Ray told it, the original concept for railroads was to move goods from production sites and ocean ports to probable sales points. Trains eventually made a wonderful difference in agriculture. They bridged the gap between growers and consumers.
A side benefit of railroad expansion was to open the countryside along the way. People settled where people had not been. The Ministry of Development permitted expropriation of private property to provide the path. There was an amazingly simple 19-day procedure to go from charting a course to obtaining right-of-ways. The standard excuses for seizing land were improper titles or unpaid taxes. Each loser received at least token compensation. Sometimes there were little rebellions. Sometimes there were celebrations.
This being Mexico, some landowners received more than they asked. President or dictator Porfirio Diaz, in his late years, was a big booster of railroads. He wanted to showcase Mexico as an emerging economic power. He really wanted a breezeway between the Atlantic and Pacific.
Somebody said Mexico had 15,360 miles of rails. Growing nationalistic fervor caused Díaz to gather main routes under government control and lease them out as concessions. The centennial year of 1910 was a landmark.
After that came a bump in the road. Voices of discontent screamed for change. Insurrection broke out. Violence occurred. When order is lost, property sometimes goes with it.
Different forces took over different railroads to transport troops and supplies. Normal commerce was set aside. Revenue, what there was, may have been diverted. War usually includes chaos. Bridges were destroyed. Tracks were wrecked to stop enemy movement. Sometimes people were killed just for the hell of it. That made foreigners nervous. Investors fled.
In 10 years or so, Mexico settled down and railroads really did play a significant role in growth. They, too, grew so successful that on June 13, 1937, the federal government nationalized them. You may have heard of this procedure. The same thing happened in the oil industry. There was more foreign money in trains.
Tough. Ray Morrison tiptoed around an explanation of the birth and surge of the railway workers' union. I know it was one of the big boys in the 71-year reign of the Revolutionary Institutional Party.
Government and the union had one serious difference of opinion. Railway workers went on strike in 1958. Along came trains filled with soldiers to stop the foolishness. As Ray told the story, there was a noisy confrontation between a soldier and a striker. The soldier said, "Do you see that telegraph pole? We'll hang you from it."
By the 1980s, Mexico railroads had peaked and were going downhill. Repairs were put off for lack of pesos. National ownership wasn't doing very well. One year there was a deficit of $552 million. Trucks were infringing on freight profits.
In the 1990s, the feds reversed field and permitted private companies to control rail routes. Kansas City Southern took the profitable miles that link Mexico City, Monterrey, the Pacific port of Lazaro Cardenas and the busy border crossing at Nuevo Laredo. Ferromex, subsidized by Union Pacific, got Yucatan routes and the northwest path to Arizona and California.
Passenger service faded away. Not worth the effort. There might have been a connection between the decline in passengers and profits and the almost daily failure of little trinkets like air-conditioning and inside lights. Buses rose to the occasion.
Ray Morrison relished the fact that every day since 1961, one train — the unique El Chepe — chugged through Tarahumara country and culture, above Copper Canyon. It carried workers and tourists on a truly spectacular journey to and from little towns — 408 miles, 86 tunnels, 37 bridges. Ray called it a modern miracle, a masterpiece of Mexican engineering.
Ray Morrison missed some interesting developments. Drug cartels discovered trains. Deep inside the big shipment of cauliflower might be bags of cocaine and bundles of marijuana. Or maybe the loot was riding in the box car of shoes. Eventually, border agents caught on. Railways have been fined $4 million for not being able to do what the Mexican military and federal police have found impossible.
Ray never heard the tale of the scrap steel, a big yard sale that added up to 52,000 tons. Five employees came up with the idea of dismantling abandoned railroads and selling what they could to save the company.
Government officials said this was illegal, immoral and fattening. The workers were hoping to raise $800,000. The government said the deal should have generated $140 million. I don't know if anybody was railroaded off to jail.
Ray Morrison would have enjoyed hearing that railroad business is again heating up, that the future appears brighter. He would have really gotten a kick out of the high-speed dream, the bullet train that will almost fly the 360 miles between Mexico City and Guadalajara. Both cities are obviously clogged and the federal government would have you believe highways in between are bumper to bumper.
I can hear Ray now: "This being Mexico, that project may take a while."
If Ray were still alive, he'd be checking around Japan and France for surplus bullet-train components just in case.
Contact