Yucatan, Mexico

[ddechamp71]

Hi all, last week I spent some time in Cancun, Mexico, thanks to my employer. As beaches and nightclubs are no thrill stuff for me, I prefered to have tourism.

A while before, on a previous trip to Cancun, and for the same reasons I preffered to go to Merida, Mexico's Yucatan state capital, and have some time in the railroad museum I had discovered while surfing on the web. This museum is run by a very kind man, a former NdeM railroader. Vey interresting museum indeed, that hosts 2 operating locomotives, an ALCO C420, and an EMD reengined ALCO RS1. Furthermore it hosts the last F-Unit in Mexico and the last ALCO C628 in all north america.

On the other hand when reading a mexican railroad magazine I discovered there is an operating railroad line between Merida and Valladolid which is halfway from Cancun to Merida.

This line sees only 2 or 3 trains each way a week: 2 unit trains which brings fuel loaded tank cars to Valladolid's power station, plus a local freight.

Problem: how to manage not to hold 24 or 48 hours along the line waiting for a train?

That's where the Merida railroad museum's manager comes onto the stage: he gave me a phone number to call Ferrocarril Chiapas-Mayab's dispatcher, in order to obtain the trains' schedule (pero hay que tener cuidado, esos hombres solo hablan espa~nol!).

And the luck was with me: one morning I gave a phone call, and the guy very kindly replied me a train left Merida soon in the morning bound for Valladolid. I just had time to rent a car and to carry out the 2-hour drive to meet the train.

And what a pleasure to see the unit train of tankcars, powered with an old U25B, twisting and waddling on poor and light track embedded within the vegetation, at 12 mph maximum track speed....The line seems virtually abandonned unless the shiny rails....

And when looking at the U25B resting overnight at the old depot in Valladolid, I realized I was at the very terminus of all Canada-USA-Mexico railroad network!

I've some pictures of all this to share here, but as I' m not the computer's Frank Zappa (and neither at the guitar, furthermore, but it's another story[:D]), I don't manage to insert them here.

Maybe a king of computers could help me there?

All the best,

Dominique

[Anonymous]

wow! that must have been something pretty cool to see