The man who put a railway across the Peruvian Andes was a fugitive. Henry Meiggs slipped out of San Francisco on the night of 6 October 1854 aboard the brig American, leaving behind forged city warrants worth, by some accounts, half a million dollars. Fourteen years later the Peruvian government handed him a contract worth 27 million pounds to build a line from the Pacific to a summit tunnel at 4,781 metres, a height no railway in the world would exceed until China opened the Qinghai-Tibet line in 2006.
That line, the Ferrocarril Central, is the one everyone quotes. But it is the quieter Southern Railway, which Meiggs started at the same time and which climbs from Arequipa over a 4,470-metre pass to Lake Titicaca and on to Cusco, that a traveller can still ride end to end today. How it was built, who built it, and what it cost a country that paid in guano and bonds, is the story behind every mile the Andean Explorer covers.
A steamship carried to the lake on mules
To understand why Peru wanted a railway into the Andes at any price, start with a boat. In 1861 the government ordered two iron gunboats for Lake Titicaca from the Thames Ironworks and the James Watt foundry in Birmingham. The Yavari was shipped from England on 15 October 1862 in 2,766 separate pieces, none heavier than three and a half hundredweight, because that is what a mule can carry. From the port of Arica the parts went 40 miles by rail to Tacna and then 350 kilometres overland to Puno. The contractor had quoted six months. The last pieces arrived on 1 January 1869, more than six years after they left England, and the ship was launched on Christmas Day 1870 with a 60-horsepower steam engine fired on dried llama dung. The Yavari Project, which has restored her at Puno, records all of this in its archive.
A country whose highlands could only be supplied at that speed had an obvious problem. Lima's first railway, Callao to the capital, had opened on 17 May 1851 across the flat coastal strip; the silver, copper and wool of the sierra lay behind a wall of rock three to four kilometres high. By the late 1860s Peru had guano revenue and a government willing to borrow against it. What it needed was a contractor.
The contractor from San Francisco
Henry Meiggs was born in Boston on 7 July 1811 and made and lost a fortune in California. When his San Francisco debts caught up with him he fled by sea, arriving in Chile with, he later claimed, eight thousand dollars. There he built the country's second railway, between Santiago and Valparaíso, and rebuilt his name as the man who finished lines others had abandoned. In 1868 Peru gave him the Mollendo to Arequipa concession; on 21 September that year he proposed the far harder Lima to La Oroya line, and the contract was signed on 23 December 1869. The budget was 27 million pounds, raised on bonds paying six per cent.
The famous boast, "I will place rails there, where the llamas walk", is attributed to Meiggs by most accounts. But the man who worked out where the rails could physically go was a Polish engineer, Ernest Malinowski, who had arrived in Lima on 30 December 1852, had proposed a line into the Jauja valley as early as 1851, and completed his survey of the Central route on 3 April 1869. Meiggs was the financier and the organiser of labour. Malinowski was the reason the line stayed on the mountain.
The Southern Railway: Mollendo to the lake
Work on the southern line ran in parallel with the Central and, for a time, faster. The Mollendo to Arequipa section opened on 1 January 1871, lifting trains from sea level to the city at 2,301 metres. From Arequipa the surveyors took the line north-east across the altiplano, reaching its summit at Crucero Alto, 4,470 metres above sea level, before dropping to the junction at Juliaca and the lakeshore at Puno. The National Library of Peru dates the Arequipa to Puno inauguration to 1874; other references give 1876 for completion of the section, and the difference probably lies between the first ceremonial train and regular service. Either way, within five years of the first spike Peru had a standard-gauge railway from the Pacific to Lake Titicaca, roughly 3,800 metres up.
The labour was largely Chilean. Chilean studies put the number of workers recruited for the Arequipa to Puno line in 1870 and 1871 at between 25,000 and 30,000, and document violence and abuse on a scale that soured relations between the two countries. The National Library's own account describes the wider workforce as Peruvian, European and Chinese. Nobody kept a reliable count of the dead.
The Central: rails above the condors
The Lima line is the one that made Meiggs a legend. Construction began at Monserrate station in January 1870, and over eight years the railway climbed the Rímac gorge on reversing zigzags at Viso, Tamboraque, Cacray and elsewhere, where the valley was too narrow for a curve, across some 58 bridges and through around 69 tunnels. It reached Chicla in 1878. Then the money ran out. Peru had defaulted on its foreign debt in 1876, Meiggs died in Lima on 30 September 1877, and the War of the Pacific in 1879 stopped everything and wrecked part of what had been built.
It took the Grace Contract of 1890, under which Peru handed its railways to the Peruvian Corporation for 66 years in settlement of its bond debt, to finish the job. The Galera summit tunnel, 1,177 metres long with its crown at 4,781 metres, was driven through in that period; the line reached La Oroya in 1893 and Huancayo, 346 kilometres from Lima, in 1908. Sources give the tunnel altitude variously as 4,781 and 4,783 metres; the mountain above it is named Mount Meiggs. A mine spur to Volcán in 1955 briefly pushed Peruvian rails to 4,830 metres. Malinowski, who had gone to Ecuador during the war, came back in 1886 and died in Lima on 2 March 1899; a seven-metre bronze of him stands at Ticlio.
Cusco, at last
The branch from Juliaca towards Cusco was begun in 1872 and then stalled for decades in the same financial wreckage. The Peruvian Corporation pushed it over the watershed at La Raya and down the Vilcanota valley, and trains reached Wánchaq station in Cusco in 1908. La Raya is lower than Crucero Alto, but it is the pass most travellers remember because the train stops there. Its height is given as 4,313 metres in rail references and as 4,335 or 4,343 metres in travel accounts, depending on where the marker is taken to stand. A narrow-gauge line from Cusco down the Urubamba to the foot of Machu Picchu followed from 1920, a different railway with a different story, worked today by the Hiram Bingham.
Milestones
- 1851 Callao to Lima, Peru's first railway, opens on 17 May.
- 1862 The steamer Yavari leaves England in 2,766 pieces for Lake Titicaca.
- 1869 Meiggs signs the Lima to La Oroya contract on 23 December; budget 27 million pounds.
- 1871 Mollendo to Arequipa opens on 1 January.
- 1874 Arequipa to Puno inaugurated over Crucero Alto, 4,470 metres.
- 1876 Peru defaults on its foreign debt.
- 1877 Meiggs dies in Lima, 30 September.
- 1890 Grace Contract hands the railways to the Peruvian Corporation for 66 years.
- 1893 Central line reaches La Oroya through the Galera tunnel, 4,781 metres.
- 1908 Trains reach Cusco over La Raya; Central line reaches Huancayo.
- 2006 The Qinghai-Tibet railway opens, and the Peruvian record falls after more than a century.
The myth of the highest railway
You will still read that Peru has the highest railway in the world. It does not, and has not since July 2006, when the Tanggula pass on the Qinghai-Tibet line opened at 5,072 metres; the Galera tunnel now ranks second. What remains true, and is more interesting, is that the Peruvian lines were built in the 1870s and 1880s by hand and by mule, at heights where the Qinghai-Tibet builders 130 years later were piping oxygen to their workers, and that they still work. The Central is a freight railway today. The Southern carries passengers.
Riding Meiggs's line today
The Southern Railway is now the route of the Andean Explorer, South America's first luxury sleeper train, which entered service in May 2017 using carriages that had previously run as the Great South Pacific Express in Australia between 1999 and 2003 and were shipped to Peru in February 2016. It has 35 sleeper cabins, two dining cars, an observation car and oxygen enrichment on board, a courtesy the navvies of 1871 did not enjoy. The one-night journey runs between Cusco and Puno over La Raya; the longer itinerary continues across the altiplano, over Crucero Alto, and down to Arequipa, which is Meiggs's 1874 line travelled in reverse. Our guide to Peru by luxury rail sets out how the pieces fit together, and when to go matters more here than on most routes because of the altiplano's wet season. If this would be your first sleeper train, start here, or browse every train we cover and the rest of the journal.
