Sapucai and the bones of the trains

Sapucai (take your pick on the spelling) - the Scream

The road to Potrero Pucu from Paraguari cuts between two long lines of hills. Ten kilometers before my pueblo of Caballero is the town of Sapucai, which has flourished in the last two years ever since the road that passes it by was asphalted over. The road runs east-west, and in summer the droning whine of cicadas mix with the bone-rattling clatter of 18-wheelers roaring by.

It could be any other Paraguayan campo town but for the workshop and the pint-sized train locomotives scattered about, rusting into decrepitude, a story forgotten and a legacy ignored. But things were not always this way. As with Paraguay’s interaction with the Jesuits, there was a moment of optimism, of a different possibility than the corruption and misguidance which crippled this country for so many years.

A little history though: Paraguay’s first (and maybe most bizarre) dictator, Dr. Francia, took office in 1811. He banned higher education and instituted mandatory interracial marriage. Most importantly, he sealed the country, banning immigration and emigration. These moves forced the mestizo-ization of Paraguay’s population, insuring Francia’s supremacy, but paradoxically forced the country to develop its domestic economy. By the end of Francia’s reign, Paraguay was one of the wealthiest countries in Latin America.

It was at this point that the hombres Lopez (Carlos, and then his son Francisco,) took over and set to modernizing the country. In 1856, they enlisted the help of William Whytehead, an English engineer. Whytehead built the San Roque station in Asuncion, and together they formed South America’s first railway company, “The Paraguay Central Railway.” 

The story goes that Paraguay had the first train, and for a time was the most modern country in South America. Since I started writing this story, I learned that was an exaggeration. 

(The hombres Lopez also brought the country a modern navy, and South America’s first foundry.) Within six years, Paraguay’s train system had laid 45 miles of track in the steamy, subtropical jungle. The first train ran in 1861, a teacup sized screecher named Sapucai, or in Guarani, “The Scream,” for its piercing whistle. It still sits in Asuncion’s central station today.

One of the trains sitting outside the workshop

As the decades passed, the rail-lines snaked south. In 1864, it reached Ypacarai, Cerro Leon, and Paraguari, thirty years later it terminated in Yegros, to the south. Sapucai, completed in 1894, sat a hundred kilometers to the south east. 

Today, the hustle and bustle of the yards is gone. Old locomotives sit forlorn amid overgrown weeds, while cows meander about and cars zip by on the newly paved highway. 

The first day that I visit, it is hot and clear, and the grass glows bright green.

One of my first views of the yards is the old turning table. Like the locomotives, it is decomposing away. The wooden ties between the rails on top are weathered and cracked with age. In the basin below, water puddles with mud and a few stubborn tufts of grass.

Decrepit as it looks, the machinery still works. A friend who has come along grasps a smooth lever arching off one end of the massive contraption, and throws his weight behind it. There is a pause, and then the wheels catch and the massive structure rotates, with nary a sound.

A sign in the middle of the turning tracks comes into view: Ransomes and Rapier, Makers, Ipswich, England.” Most of Paraguay’s rail machinery (and at first, a lot of its human talent) came from England. Sapucai housed them in a gated community of flats called “Villa Inglesa,” a few hundred yards from the work sheds.

Silent inside, but perfectly preserved

The townspeople of this small Paraguayan pueblo have chopped up tracks to serve as fence posts. The chassis of one train sits on long since grass-covered tracks, rusted almost beyond recognition. 

A few yards past, an old railroad crane also rusts into scrap. A sign on one side of the machine says, “Clutches to be out of gear before running crane in Train.” Its boiler has also turned rust brown, and the crane’s main shaft emerges from the thing like a stork’s beak.

Behind the train yards I find my first train, Encarnacion 151. It is an attractive little piece of equipment, painted black, with the Paraguayan flag, a wood hopper attached, looking for all the world like it rolled out of 1875. But in Paraguay, wood-powered engines were used until the lines shut down in 2000.

This is just the exterior of the work sheds. After paying the equivalent of a dollar US, I walk into the old repair sheds, which have been converted into a museum. The site has been cleaned and reroofed, allowing welcome sunlight to stream into the workshops, but other than that, the place has sat virtually unchanged for the last 150 years.

David Martinez Zayas leads me around the sheds. When he isn’t teaching math at the Sapucai’s high school, he sometimes leads tours at the museum.

Some old tools

The train station has been renovated for about a year, David told me. “Everything was black and dark,” David said. “We had no support from the local township, even less from the department capital.”

Now, after receiving funding from a local metallurgical company, it looks less like a museum than a perfectly preserved workstation.

“It’s amazing you can just go see all this rusty machinery that looks like you could just go and use it,” said one of my friends who came along to check the place out.

The rails came to Sapucai for its natural resources, David said.

“The technicians chose Sapucai for its wood and water, which wouldn’t dry up,” David told me. (The workshops draw water from a natural spring that sits on top of some of the nearby hills that ring the town. The gravity fed well was Paraguay’s first running water system.)

At first, Paraguay relied on outside help to run its trains. Then, it decided to run the show in house.

 “If something was broke, they [the engineers] would have to send it to England. Finally, they said, ‘No. we can’t depend on England, we have to be able to repair things here.’”

The extent of the railway, from Asuncion south, and east towards Iguazu Falls

An old list of fares

Many of the people who used to work at the junction still live nearby. While I was in Sapucai, I visited a few. The first former worker of the ferrocarril that I talk to is Antonio Bacilides Belarga Lopez Gimenez, a former carpenter. I arrive at his house on an early Sunday morning. He comes to meet me from his chacra, where he was working. He is wearing macintosh rain boots, and billowing brown pants that would better fit him if he gained 40 pounds. But he has an easy smile. His shirt is plaid, and a straw hat crawls down over his ears.

Lopez, 73, started working for the railroad in 1974, and continued there for 23 years.

He is slow to talk about the train, and we are at cross purposes, talking in Guarani and Spanish while I try to convert it all to English. But there are small snatches of pride in the conversation that point to what it must have been like, an institution of regularity and semi-modernity in a country that, at the time, was anything but.

“The workshop was the biggest in Paraguay. It was the lung of the railway,” he said. “Here, we made 

everything and sent it to the other stations [in Asuncion and San Roque.]”

“There wasn’t other [reliable] work,” he said. “And there, they paid monthly.”

Now, the asphalt road links the town to the capital. But until just two years ago, the only ways to reach the town were through the train, or a 25km dirt track from the town of Paraguarí.

“When it rained, buses wouldn’t come,” he said. “But the train never failed.”

There was the everyday rhythm of the place. A huge clock hung at the train yards. Every morning, it let out a blast an hour before work started. The workers shifting in their beds, drinking down maté and cocido. A second blast, half an hour before work began, and then they are hustling out of their houses to get to the yards, the clock whistling twice more as the beginning of the work day approached.

Those were the things that mattered, the memories that remain, he said. I asked him what he liked best, and he without even thinking, he said, “My favorite thing was eating breakfast with my brother and my friends in the mornings.”

At 11:25, the clock would whistle again, and they would have five minutes to lay down their tools and wash their hands before lunch. Then, an hour break, followed by four more hours of work.

The trains pulled out of Sapucai at 6 every morning for Asuncion and at 3pm for Encarnacion. When he talks about it, Lopez gets downright wistful.

“It was like a big party. People went to sell things, they went for curiosity.”

And then the party ended. At the end of the 90’s, the rail service began getting cut back. Mario Gonzalez also worked at the junction. The trains hadn’t had any substantive modernization in the 140 years it ran – it still was using wood powered trains and steam powered workshops. The rail infrastructure was pretty much the same as had been used in the past, and began to wear out. When a gas powered train carrying 60 wagons came through from Argentina, it went straight off the rails, he said.

“They couldn’t handle the weight or the velocity of the train,” Gonzalez said.

There was talk of restoring and rejuvenating the line, he said. The king of Spain visited, and pledged millions for the project, but it never materialized. Japan was also interested, allegedly. “But they didn’t want to give money because of the corruption [here],” he said.

“Political interest is what damned it,” he said.

As in the states now, the train transported freight at significantly cheaper prices than the truckers. “It was only half as expensive as trucks!” Gonzalez said. The massive (relatively) effort put in to create a transnational train system went to waste, and now rails, stations, and locomotives around the country lie derelict, disappear under the weeds. And so a national treasure sank into oblivion. 

It's not a bad metaphor for the country as a whole, this beautiful place which has until recently suffered through so many mishaps.