The railways of Mexico are fascinating to me. At one level, they are very familiar, for they often have a shared history with railroading north of the border. In fact, several early main lines were laid north-south, sometimes because they were financed by American investors hoping to extend their reach into Mexico, and sometimes because Mexican investors (and occasionally the state) hoped to benefit from northern trade.
One of the more famous examples of this is Denver & Rio Grande. That second place name, the river that divides the U.S. from its southern neighbor, was included by the company’s investors because their original goal was to link Colorado’s largest metropolis with Mexico City. There are, however, several more obscure examples. Few now recall that the southernmost terminus of Southern Pacific was not San Diego or Houston or Brownsville, but Guadalajara, a thousand miles into Mexico. And did you know that the first western terminus of the mighty Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe was established, in the early 1880s, not in Los Angeles or San Francisco, but in Guaymas, in the Mexican state of Sonora? Or that, until 1971, it was possible to ride a through sleeper on Missouri Pacific from St. Louis to Mexico City?
Much of Mexico’s railway equipment is likewise shared, including a penchant for the diesel products of American Locomotive Company. Nacionales de México, Ferrocarril del Pacifico, and others rostered everything from end-cab switchers to big, six-axle freight motors, and after Alco shut down U.S. construction, Mexico’s railroads turned to Alco’s Canadian licensee, Montreal Locomotive Works, for additional units. Well into the 1970s, it was possible to see big, new, Alco-powered engines south of the border, alongside the many former U.S. units living their second lives.
Some of the best-known examples are the secondhand purchases of units discarded by American railroads after Alco closed in 1969. Consider the case of the PA-1, a rakishly styled passenger unit of the late 1940s. Examples survive today because FCP purchased four ex-Santa Fe units from Delaware & Hudson in 1978. Today, two remain in Mexico, while two are now back in the U.S., with one being restored to operating condition by Delaware-Lackawanna in Scranton, Pa.
And it’s not only Alcos that went south. Perhaps the most interesting U.S. equipment to cross the border was two H-16-44 models from Fairbanks-Morse. Sold to Bosques de Chihuahua — a Mexican logging railroad — one unit was from the mid-1950s, while the other was built in 1961, long after FM had effectively given up on the U.S. railway market.
Alongside such famous examples of these, add in scores — if not hundreds — of heavyweight Pullmans and streamlined Budd-built sleepers and coaches, and in more recent years, even secondhand Amfleet equipment.
Yet there is also a spark of the unusual in Mexico’s railway equipment. Since at least the 1960s, the country’s railways have preferred bold “supergraphic” paint schemes, or liveries that turn away from traditional, “railroady” combinations. Thinking outside of the box also extends to equipment choices. Alongside North American locomotives and cars, Mexican railways also made use of diesel railcars built by Italy’s Fiat and the U.K.’s Metro Camel. Passenger consists, late in the last century, mixed secondhand U.S.-built equipment with head-end cars from Switzerland and coaches built in Japan.
Whether in the pages of books and magazines, or in person, there’s much to railfan if we look south.
—Alexander Benjamin Craghead is a transportation historian, photographer, artist, and author.
