São Paulo Railway

São Paulo Railway (SPR) was a railway company in São Paulo (state), Brazil.

In 1859, a group of people led by the Barão de Mauá convinced the imperial government that it was important to construct a railroad connecting São Paulo to the coast at Porto de Santos. The 800 meters ascent of the mountains was considered impractical and therefore Mauá favoured one of the biggest specialists, the Scottish railroad engineer James Brunlees.

Brunlees came to Brazil and considered that the project was viable. However there was no one to execute the project. He recommended the engineer Daniel Makinson Fox who had experience in the construction of railways through the mountains of northern Wales and the hillsides of the Pyrenees.

Fox proposed that the part of the route that went through the mountains would have to be divided in four switch-backs or zig-zags, each one having an 8% grade. In these stretches, the wagons would be pulled by steel cables. In the end of each switch-back, a tail-track convert|75|m|ft in length would be constructed, with a 1.3% grade. In each one of these tail-tracks, a stationary steam-powered winding engine would power the cables.

The proposal was approved by Brunlees and a new company was established, the "São Paulo Railway - S.P.R". The capital to build the line was mostly British, and the railway company's official name was in English, not Portuguese.

The road was constructed without explosives, therefore the land was very unstable. The hollowing of the rocks was only made with feathers and wedges. Embankments of 3 to 20 m in height were constructed to protect the tracks from torrential rains. This used convert|230000|m3 of rock.

The spite of all the difficulties, the construction finished 10 months ahead of the date specified in the contract, which was eight years. The "São Paulo Railway" was opened to trains on 1867-02-16. Coffee was carried to Porto de Santos.

In 1895 the company started to build a new line, parallel to the old one. For this new track, it used a funicular railways system of continuous rope haulage. In this system, the track was divided into five sections. In each section, for each wagon that went up there was another coming down to counterbalance it, as in an elevator.

In 1889, the first protests were made against the British monopoly over the route to Porto de Santos, which began the culmination with the construction of "Mairinque-Santos" in 1910, for Estrada de Ferro Sorocabana.

On 1946-09-13, the railroad was nationalised by the Brazilian government, and renamed the Estrada de Ferro Santos a Jundiaí, and on 1948-09-27, it was merged with most of the other Brazilian railways in to the "Rede Ferroviária Federal, SA" (RFFSA).

In the 1970, the haulage system was replaced by a rack railway. It was installed by the Japanese firm Marubeni, and the locomotives had been constructed by Hitachi.

External links

* [http://www.novomilenio.inf.br/santos/h0102n.htm History of the São Paulo Railway] in Portuguese
* [http://mikes.railhistory.railfan.net/r059.html A Gateway to Brazil]
* [http://www.pell.chi.il.us/~efbrazil/efsj.html The Estrada de Ferro Santos a Jundiaí]
* [http://www.locomotivesinternational.co.uk/books/a_very_british_railway.shtml A Very British Railway (book by Paul Catchpole)]