The Morelos Train Line

A narrow-gauge railroad, crossing the country from Vera Cruz to Acapulco, was long ago projected, by way of Jalapa, Puebla, Mexico City, and Cuernavaca.

This transcontinental line is continued westward from the capital by the Morelos Railroad, one of the very few enterprises purely Mexican in character and controlled by energetic native capitalists. It runs at first parallel with the old road to Puebla, over which travel has rolled for centuries, and which, even in this age of steam, is crowded with the mules and donkeys of the freighters. Two daily trains leave the gate of San Lazaro for the South, composed of first, second, and third class cars, the fare being two cents per mile for the former, and less than one cent for the latter. At the hacienda of Los Reyes, composed of a few scattered adobe huts, a train connects for the ancient city of Tezcoco, and eventually for Puebla.

The scenery for the most part is dreary, but plains waving with grain, like those of Ameca and Ozumba, and the great volcanoes always in sight, especially from the latter place, make the route one of varied interest. Beyond the Mexican plateau, fifty miles from the capital, the road descends over a forbidding country, known as the mal pais, or "bad lands," fifty miles farther, to the town of Cuautla. This is a place of note, situated in tierra calicute, celebrated for its great sugar plantations and tropical fruits.

On the 18th of June, 1881, the Morelos road was formally opened to this point with a grand banquet, and an assembling here of nearly all the notables of Mexico. A week later a most terrible accident occurred at the barranca of Malpais, caused by the washing away of the foundations of a bridge, by which two hundred persons, principally soldiers, were precipitated down a ravine, and the cars, loaded with lime and rum, took fire, enveloping the victims in flames. Had that accident happened at the opening of the road, when President Gonzalez, Diaz, Romero, and most of the leading men of Mexico were there, the consequences to the republic would have been most disastrous. The whole work, with its sharp and numerous curves, and its insecure bridges, seemed to justify the boast of the native population (before the accident), that the engineer was a Mexican, and had never built a road before. The disaster proved a lesson to the American engineers, especially those who came first in the dry season, when all the ravines and arroyos are bare, and who realized that they must reside here through a rainy season or two before they could fully understand the perils of a road from floods.

The Mexican manner of railroad building, I may remark in passing, is diametrically opposed to the American. First, you must get a "concession,"--permission to build. Then you seek out some point far distant from any existing railroad, and transport your material to that place. To begin at the coast would be contrary to Mexican tradition, and establish a damaging precedent. By beginning at the farther end of the line, you give employment to a great many carters and teamsters, which is but simple justice, as the road when built will certainly take away their freights. Realizing this, these aggrieved people make their charges accordingly. This way of constructing a road will take more time and capital, but you will have the sympathies of the owners of mules and diligences, and the satisfaction of having offended nobody's pet theories and traditions. The road will approach completion so gradually that it will seem as though it had always existed, and by that time you may have the pleasure of renewing the portion first built, and of employing the descendants, even to the third generation, of your original workmen.

It was in this manner that the first railroad in Yucatan was built, and various others, and was originally insisted upon by the Mexican government in regard to the two great American roads. In making the road from Tampico to San Luis Potosi, for instance, material and rolling-stock were carted into the interior over tremendous hills, at a frightful expense, because the charter read "from San Luis to Tampico," instead of the reverse.