Porto Velho, Madeira River, in construction period of Madeira-Mamoré Railway.
Igarapé of S. Vicente, Manáos.
Another line whose raison d’être is the necessity for avoiding falls on a river is the Estrada de Ferro Paulo Affonso, on the S. Francisco river, extending from the port of Piranhas in Alagôas State to Jatobá, in Pernambuco territory; the line is one hundred and fifteen kilometers long, runs on the left bank of the river, and serves as a carrier for the raw material and output of the big cotton-spinning mill (Fabrica da Pedra) recently established. The factory obtains power from the tremendous Paulo Affonso Falls, about thirty miles distant, and several plans have been made to convey force to Bahia city, dependent upon imported fuels for generating motive power.
The third interior, river-serving little strip of railroad is in the State of Maranhão, running from Therezina on the Parnahyba river, boundary with Piauhy State, to Caxias; the fourth is a line in the interior of Pará, and is still under construction although about fifty kilometers are in operation. It runs from Alcobaça on the Tocantins river past a series of troublesome runs and cascades to the Praia da Rainha, near the junction of the Tocantins with the greater Araguaya.
Railways in Brazil have thus chiefly served the settled sea ports, penetrating the producing agricultural areas behind them; coastwise linking from town to town has been an afterthought, and has not been greatly needed with the maintenance of good shipping service. The Brazilian lines have been criticized for lack of coherence, but the fact is that no other plan could have been followed at the time when Brazilian building began; mileage may appear small in relation to the republic’s 3,300,000 square miles of territory, but it is not poor in regard to the great centres of population, all of which are grouped upon sea or river borders and possess ample shipping facilities. At the beginning of 1922, according to the calculations of Brazil-Ferro-Carril, there were twenty-one thousand miles of railways in operation in Brazil, with three thousand under construction and twenty thousand miles projected; as we have seen, today a great deal of interstate linking has been accomplished, as well as junction with sister republics.
Lack of coherence in operation is perhaps more open to criticism than any other point in connection with Brazilian railroads. Certain lines are owned and operated by States; others are owned by States but leased to private foreign or Brazilian companies; again there are groups of lines built, owned and operated by private foreign or Brazilian companies, and there are lines owned by the Federal Government some of which are leased to private operating companies and some operated by the Government itself. The building of the lines was extremely cosmopolitan, lines having been built preponderantly by the British but also by French, Belgian, German and, in the case of the Madeira-Mamoré, American, companies: this entailed remarkable variety in equipment—for instance, when taken over by the Great Western in 1901 the little São Francisco line had a gauge of five feet three inches. As some other strips then acquired were narrow gauge much work had to be done before a uniform width of one meter was created.
At the beginning of the present century the Federal Government determined upon a plan of ownership of lines which has been followed as far as finances would permit; a large sum of money, of which £12,935,480 is outstanding, was borrowed in London at four per cent interest and with the proceeds many railroads were bought up. In most cases the Government decided not to operate the lines acquired, and leased them to foreign companies. As a result of the concession system Brazilian Federal accounts show the curious financial anomaly of the Government paying out sums to railroads because interest had been guaranteed on the foreign capital invested, while the same road is paying rent to the Government.
The lines owned and operated by strong British companies are quite the most prosperous in the country: many of them were fortunate in their choice of locality, each of three climbers of the Serra do Mar for example remaining the only negotiable link of the coast with interior regions: the Brazilian Government, in common with certain of the other countries where Federal control of transportation has been tried, has reaped small financial reward from lines officially operated.
In an exposition of Brazilian railway conditions made before the Rio Legislature in October, 1915, Elpidio de Salles declared that better supervision was badly needed: “deficits constitute the normal state of the Federal services” and it is only from privately owned companies that profits are obtained, he declared, proceeding to show that from systems leased to other companies by the Union an average income of five thousand contos of reis is paid to Brazil, these contributions coming regularly from the Great Western, the Ceará-Piauhy, the Viação Bahiana, Sul-Mineira, Central of Rio Grande do Norte, Madeira-Mamoré, the Auxiliaire and the Santa Catharina lines. On the other hand, Cardoso de Almeida has shown that the Brazilian Government has spent 1,100,000 contos of reis (at normal exchange, about £75,000,000 or $375,000,000) on construction and “rescision” of railroads, bearing the burden of forty thousand contos due annually as interest. Railroad debts are, however, those which a sturdy developing young land can bear better than older countries can hope to do, and Brazil certainly is not over-railroaded: Argentina, next door, with a quarter of Brazil’s population and one-third of her territory, has thirty-five thousand kilometers of line.
Brazilian “estradas de ferro” have nearly all one promising feature in common: they are pioneer paths, with new towns camped beside their tracks, and new industries growing up about them: with the exception of the old mining settlements in the interior of Minas and Bahia, scarcely any development existed in the Brazilian hinterlands until the railroads drove a way; nearly all give access, and as they move farther across sertão and through forest, will give greater access, to virgin lands uncharted and unknown. In the southern states many of the concessions given to railway companies carried colonization clauses as a continuation of the deliberate, thoroughly worked out plan of the authorities by which during the nineteenth century settlements were made of Poles, Russians, Swiss, Germans and other European races, with the object of feeding the lines and stimulating agriculture. The European War has checked these plans: settlers from Europe will in all probability be scarce for many years to come, engaged as the racked countries will be in their own rehabilitation. But to other nations where populations are crowded or conditions no longer offer wide land spaces and large agricultural rewards, the railroads of Brazil open a country of unsurpassed beauty and fertility.
What railway construction is waiting in Brazil for capital, good engineering, and—an urgent necessity in dealing with huge empty spaces—imagination? The great heart of Brazil, which is also the great heart of South America, is only newly entered by little pioneer tracks. What bold projects could open up the interior sertões to the planter?