Riding the San Paulo Railway

摘要

In 1900, half the coffee drunk by the world passed through Santos, a port in southern Brazil. All that coffee was produced in the plains surrounding Sao Paulo, a city which sits on a vast plateau, two and half thousand feet above sea level. Santos and Sao Paulo are separated by a precipitous line of cliffs named the Serra do Mar. "The depth of the valleys is tremendous, and the number of mountains, one above another, seems to leave no hope of reaching the end," sighed a Jesuit priest, Vasconcellos, who ascended the route in the seventeenth century. "The greater part of the way you have not to travel, but to get on with hands and feet, and by the roots of trees... I confess my flesh trembled when I looked down." Building a railway along this route had been dismissed as impossible until the intervention of James Brunlees, a British engineer based in London. In the 1850s, Brunlees summoned one of his assistants, Daniel Fox, and packed him off to Brazil to plan the railway's route, then sent him back again to supervise its construction. (The building and operation of the railway is described fully in Paul Catchpole's 'A Very British Railway'.)