Oruro is nearly six hundred miles from Antofagasta and the journey used formerly to take three days, for trains were only run by daylight and at slow speed. We found, however, that the roadbed had been improved, although the track was not widened, and a vestibuled train with two compartment sleeping-cars and a restaurant-car can now make the journey from Oruro to Antofagasta in two nights and a day. Three times a week a Bolivia
railway train leaves La Paz in the morning and arrives at Oruro late in the afternoon. Once a week, as soon after the arrival of this train as possible, the new vestibuled train starts for Antofagasta. There is no chance for a through service, for the Bolivia Railway has a meter gauge, while the Antofagasta line is only three-quarters of a meter wide. Furthermore owing to some unfortunate squabble between the railroad companies, the stations are located at some distance from one another, and the traveller must get across the town as best he may.
When the Antofagasta line was completed, Oruro increased in population by leaps and bounds, and the admiring Bolivians called their city the “Chicago of Bolivia.” The only resemblance, however, that I was able to discover was this forced transfer across the city. The streets of Oruro which one has to cross in going from one terminal station to the other are not paved, and the traveller who happens to take the journey in the rainy reason, when the roads are two feet deep in mud, will wish this were Chicago!
The departure of the weekly train for Antofagasta is just as much of an event for Oruro as that of the weekly steamer is for a port in the Hawaiian Islands or the West Indies. Every one who can comes down to the station, and those who can afford it crowd into the restaurant car, order drinks and enjoy the iced luxuries just as the residents of the Caribbean ports do when a mail-steamer calls.
We had been advised by friends in New York not to attempt to use this railway as it was only intended to carry ore and no one cared how many passengers were killed. It did give one a creepy feeling to see a heavy sleeping-car balanced on rails that were only twenty-eight inches apart. It seemed like riding on a monorail and I could not help wondering whether, if the berths on one side of the sleeping-car should happen to be filled first, the car would not capsize. Evidently this thought had occurred to the builders of the car, for by an ingenious arrangement the berths are all in the centre of the car, directly over the rails!
We left Oruro at dusk and during the night passed through Challapata, the end of our mule trip, and Uyuni, where Don Santiago’s stages start for Potosí, Tupiza, and La Quiaca via Cotagaita.