NARROW GAUGE ON THE CUSP OF MODERNIZATION
Costa Rican Rails T
MICHAEL T. BURKHART/PHOTOS BY THE AUTHOR
HERE’S TROUBLE ON THE TRACKS AHEAD. A car and motorcycle crash near the gauge has the train stopped
and police and medical personnel have yet to arrive. It’ll be more than an hour before commuters can negotiate the grid- locked streets, let alone allow the train to move. And to make matters worse, a sinkhole opened up in the eastern suburbs, undermining the railway and suspending service on the busy line. Such is daily life for the Instituto Costarricense de Ferrocarriles (better known as “Incofer”) railway in and around San Jose, Costa Rica, a system that is fighting to return after near-to- tal abandonment in the 1990s. With a storied past, the three-foot six-inch gauge railway is working to modernize
58 APRIL 2017 •
RAILFAN.COM
and become a more reliable transpor- tation link for this Central American metropolitan area of 2.1 million people.
History There were two distinct projects that
linked the capital with rail lines to the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Construc- tion on the Atlantic line began in 1871 between Alajuela, San Jose, and Limon but it did not open until 1890 because of funding issues and the rugged terrain that goes up and over the continental divide. The line to the Pacific was started in 1897, opened in 1910, and electrified 20 years later. Both lines were initially designed by American engineers, with some rail rolled by Lackawanna Steel in Buffalo. There was another section of
electrified line near the Atlantic coast serving the banana plantations and was not fully upgraded until the early 1980s. While both railways were consolidated under government control in 1977, two main terminals remain in San Jose — Estación Atlántico and Estación Pacifico — connected by street running through the city, making it a transcontinental route in just about 250 miles. A series of unforuntate events conspired to close down the railway. First there were landslides in 1988. Then the massive Limon Earthquake damaged the line near the Atlantic coast in 1991. While repairs were made following the quake, the railway was already unprof- itable and everything was shut down in 1995, with a skeleton staff retained to
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