The American businessman William H. Aspinwall had created a company and raised funds to build a railway across the Isthmus of Panama, and connect with his San Francisco steamships at Panama City. The project’s timing could not have been better, the discovery of gold in California in January 1848 created a flood of immigrants desperate to reach California …. and a railway across the Isthmus offered the quickest route. In May 1850, the railroad began construction; but very quickly, the difficulty of the scheme became apparent.
Much of the route was through jungle and swamp, the heat was unbearable, mosquitoes (carrying dengue fever, yellow fever, and malaria) were everywhere and for more than half the year, the deluges of rain meant many workers were toiling in water up to four feet deep. The swamps were so deep that they often required more than a hundred feet of gravel backfill to create a stable surface on which the rail lines could be laid. The only power equipment they had came from the railway locomotives and could only reach as far as the railhead, most of the work had to be done by hand using picks, shovels and mule carts.
The cost of constructing the railway was huge, both in financial terms and in the human costs.
Cholera, Yellow fever and malaria took a deadly toll among the workers, and despite the continual supply of large numbers of new workers, there were times when the work stalled for simple lack of healthy labourers. Labourers came from as far away as Ireland, India, China and Australia. The project was facing failure when in November 1851, two large steamships with about 1,000 passengers were forced to shelter in Limón Bay, Panama due to a hurricane in the Caribbean. With the docks built and 7 miles of railway line completed, an emergency service was laid on, carrying passengers (on flatbed cars used for transporting railway sleepers and materials), at the extremely expensive rates of 50 cents per mile for passengers and $3 per 100 pounds of baggage. This windfall saved the company and made it an ongoing money earner. The directors of the company immediately ordered passenger cars, and the railway began commercial operations despite having 40 miles of track still to be laid! Services continued as the line was being built and provided both direct funds and an income against which more finance could be raised.
The complete project took over $8,000,000 to build (8 times the original estimate) and cost between 5,000 and 10,000 lives. Over 170 bridges and culverts had to be built. It was completed in January 1855 and the first train ran from the Atlantic to the Pacific on Sunday, January 28th. The single-track, 47 mile long railroad was the first to connect the oceans.
