PANAMÁ CANAL RAILWAY COMPANY

This spectacular trip between Panama City and Colón lasts one hour and takes place in an atmosphere of luxury and comfort: carpeting, leather seats, hostesses and free coffee. A little bit like the "Tropical Express"! You'll soon notice the regulars: most of them are merchants from the Free Zone of Colon who meet to play cards. Panoramic platforms have been provided for tourists. The landscapes of the forest along the canal on a part of the way and of the Gatún lake are an enchantment; one regrets then that the train goes so fast!

History.

Thus, thousands of gold seekers from the eastern United States and Europe arrived north of the isthmus. Very quickly the Panamanians organized themselves to take advantage of this flow of adventurers by making them go up the Río Chagres on board small boats. It then takes three days to join the locality of Cruces (sunken in 1908 under the lake Gatún). From there, it takes another three days of walking through the jungle to reach the Pacific. The famous Camino de Cruces, this road paved in the XVIth century to transport the wealth of the Spanish colonies, takes again service. The intrepid travelers, armed with shovels, pickaxes and revolvers, will have to pay a few dollars to transport their material on the back of a mule, without being sure of arriving alive because of an unhealthy climate, aggressive insects and robbers... When they arrive in Panama, if they have not spent the money they have left in the bars and brothels that flourish in the capital, the travelers pile up in ships towards San Francisco... the nuggets are at the end!

In this context, William Henry Aspinwall, Henry Chauncey and John Lloyd Stephens - the first two were at the head of a shipping company providing postal transport on the New York-Colon and Panamá-San Francisco lines - presented an ambitious project for a railroad across the isthmus. The goal was to quickly transport all the gold seekers, as well as coffee, cocoa, indigo, silver, etc. This modern mode of transportation (at the time, there were only a handful of lines in the world) aroused a great deal of interest. The Panama Railroad Company was created and in April 1850, Stephens signed a concession with Diego de Paredes, governor of New Grenada, for the construction and operation of the railroad. The work began two months later and attracted workers from Jamaica, Grenada, Martinique, Italy, France, Ireland, India, China... The city of Panama benefited from this titanic work and a terminal was founded on the Atlantic in 1852, Aspinwall, renamed Colón.

But the work was difficult in the tropical humidity, the mud and the swamps, and diseases took their toll: in five years 12,000 workers lost their lives on the site. One death per traverse

The first train ran in January 1855. The 75 km of track was a technological success: it took only four hours to go from one ocean to the other, compared to six days in the past. The company was very profitable: 30,000 passengers per year and tons of merchandise were transported on the most expensive train in the world per kilometer (the ticket cost US$25, payable in gold). The shares of the Panamanian Railroad Company soared to be the most expensive on the New York Stock Exchange for a time

But in 1869, the completion of the railroad linking the eastern and western United States marked the end of the "golden age" of the Panamanian line. This line would play a key role again during the construction of the canal, allowing the French and then the Americans, the successive owners of the line, to quickly transport men and materials from one side of the isthmus to the other, and above all to evacuate the tons of excavated earth.

On November 5, 1903, those in charge of the line played a heroic role in the separation of Panamá from New Grenada by refusing to send the train to Panamá, preventing Colombian soldiers from arriving in time to contain the rebellion.