“During the past year we had an addition of one hundred and forty-two kilometers to the railroad mileage of the State, bringing the figures of the total system to six thousand two hundred and seventy-nine kilometers on December 31. Of this total four thousand three hundred and fifty-five kilometers belong to private enterprises; one thousand five hundred and sixty-nine to the State and the remaining three hundred and fifty-five to the Union.”
The most important of the lines belonging to the State referred to by Dr. Altino Arantes is the Sorocabana, with over eleven hundred kilometers of track, which is leased to the Brazil Railways: the other two state properties are the Funilense Railway and the Cantareira Tramway, running from S. Paulo city up a green, well-settled valley to picturesque waterworks among woods.
The Sorocabana with its general westerly direction is one of the lines which are pushing ahead towards the Matto Grosso boundary; building on from Salto Grande on the Paranápanema river, the line reached Caramarú in 1916. As we saw when on the subject of the line from Santos to S. Paulo, railroads in the State of São Paulo only began forming a network at the top of the plateau after the Serra had been conquered[[6]]; the next to be constructed was the Paulista, which has its northern terminal at Barretos, in the heart of good cattle lands: a flourishing packing house owned by the Companhia Frigorifica e Pastoril of S. Paulo is situated near Barretos, and has as its president the same energetic Paulista who heads the railway, Conselheiro Antonio da Silva Prado. Both packing house and railway are purely Brazilian enterprises financed with Brazilian money, but the construction of the road was headed by an American named Hammond, and was in consequence known for a long time as “Hammond’s road” to distinguish it from “Fox’s road” as the pioneer line to Santos was called after the English engineer. The Paulista both served and created coffee plantations, following the lines of richest deposit of the red diabasic soils that have made S. Paulo the great coffee country of the world; the same may be said of the Mogyana, almost parallel to the Paulista but farther north, also a Brazilian owned and operated company, and the Northwestern.
Today these paralleled lines are linked with branches and possess steel arms reaching out into rich developing districts so that there is a genuine “rede ferroviario” over Paulista territory. The great coffee centre of Campinas is the point of departure for a star of lines, and so is the more northerly Riberão Preto, in the heart of the dark blood-red lands.
In a particularly fortunate position with regard to communication with other States as well as interior service, S. Paulo is linked directly to Rio by the line owned and operated by the Federal Government, the Central system, and onward from Rio due north to the port of Espirito Santo State; to the interior of Minas Geraes by way of Uberaba, Araguary and over the border into Goyaz to Catalão and Roncador; by following the Central’s lines the capital of Minas, the new town of Bello Horizonte, is reached; southward, the series of lines controlled by the Brazil Railways take the traveller from S. Paulo all through the States of Paraná, Santa Catharina and Rio Grande to the Republic of Uruguay, with connection at the border town of Santa Anna do Livramento with a line running south to Montevideo.
The writer followed this route in December, 1915. The journey took six days and nights, three of the latter being spent in the train and three at points en route while waiting for connections, certain trains running but twice a week. My path was smooth by official courtesy and the trip was pleasant as well as interesting; the sparsely occupied country, with colonies set down here and there near the track, has a delightful freshness born of bright empty spaces, woods and a multitude of shallow rapid streams.
The pine forests of Paraná and Santa Catharina with their flowery carpets were a series of fine pictures, while the wide-spread sunny pastures of southern Rio Grande, a perfect cattle country with a cool climate, are waiting for more white immigrants. Herds stray on the sides of gentle grassy slopes and in the valleys where a cluster of green marks the bed of a little river, fields are marked out and a red-tiled house nestles—but these are all too few.
The Brazil Railway Company was formed in 1906 through the initiative of Percival Farquhar with the object of unifying railway lines in South Brazil, then in several different hands as a result of the concessionary system which was the only way of inviting foreign capital in earlier days: the project also included the control of accessory ports and large industrial development along the line of the roads. About the same time the syndicate formed by Farquhar obtained interests in railways in Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay and Chile; a huge unification plan was foreshadowed.
Some of these plans have fallen through—the narrow-gauge Argentine lines leased have, for instance, returned to their former control, and Chilean interests have been dropped—partly because disturbed conditions in Europe since the first Balkan war in 1912 ended opportunities for obtaining more metal props.
Registered in the United States, the Brazil Railway Company is really a monument to French confidence in Brazil, in that the capital employed, as well as the properties acquired, is Gallic in origin to a large extent. The capital of the company is fifteen hundred million francs, and of this huge sum nine hundred million francs were subscribed in Paris, the rest of the money coming from Brussels and London. The company is interested in thirty-eight subsidiary companies, including several railroads which were bought or leased (and, in the case of the Madeira-Mamoré, constructed), a frigorifico recently completed on Rio docks, a flourishing cattle company, a land and colonization company, lumber business, interest in ports, as at Pará, Rio Grande City and Rio de Janeiro (leased out to another company), a steamship service on the Amazon river, et cetera. Land owned by the cattle company totals to over eight million acres, in the States of Matto Grosso, S. Paulo, Paraná and Rio Grande do Sul, and serious efforts are being made to improve the stock of the two or three hundred thousand head of cattle kept in various regions by the introduction of first-class breeding stock. Animals are sold to the second of S. Paulo’s packing-houses, the frigorifico at Osasco, just outside S. Paulo city, an American owned and operated enterprise[[7]] dating also from 1914, which has friendly connection with the Brazil Railways.