Development of the Mexican railway systems from its early beginnings down to 1911.
Creators: name: Howes, Robert William
Publisher: name: University of British Columbia
Year: 2011

description: The purpose of this work is to present a detailed and comprehensive study of the development of the major Mexican railways from their beginnings down to the year 1911. The choice of this subject was conditioned by the awareness that no such work existed and the hope that such a work, besides its intrinsic interest, would prove a useful basis for a study of the wider implications of the development of railways on Mexico's economic and social life. Such a study is beyond my resources in time, material and experience, and so I have confined myself to describing the concessions, construction and operation of the railways themselves. There is no detailed general history of the Mexican railways available in English. Such works as exist deal with one specific aspect of the railways or give a very superficial outline of the overall development, or else approach the subject purely from the viewpoint of the foreign investor. The amount of material, both primary and secondary, available in Spanish is, of course, much larger, but the only historical work which is both detailed and comprehensive is the series of chapters on the railways written by Sr. Francisco Caldeón for Daniel Cosío Villegas's monumental "Historia moderna de México". These chapters contain a wealth of information and I here acknowledge the great debt which I owe them in the preparation of this thesis. However, Sr. Calderón deals with all the railways in chronological periods which makes it difficult to follow the development of individual undertakings. Therefore, I have attempted to discuss the railways as entities and, for the purposes of this thesis, I have selected the pioneering F. C. Mexicano and the four major companies which were consolidated in 1908 to form the basis of the Ferro-carriles Nacionales de México. These represent the main railways built prior to the Revolution. Thus, after a brief introduction to 19th-century Mexico, the first chapter describes the protracted building of the F. C. Mexicano line to Veracruz and its subsequent development. The second chapter relates the battle for the concessions and the construction and operation of the lines to the U. S. border, the F. C. Central, F. C. Nacional and F. C. Internacional, whilst the third chapter deals with the building of the F. C. Interaceánico line to Veracruz and some of the problems faced by the railways. The fourth chapter describes the formation of the Ferro-carriles Nacionales de México and, finally, the conclusion summarizes and sums up the preceding chapters. There then follow a bibliography and an appendix containing tables and graphs relating to the railways under consideration. Where primary materials have not been available to me, I have relied heavily on Sr. Calderón's work, as mentioned above, cross-checking and supplementing it, where possible, from other sources. Every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of the dates and figures given but the usual reservations regarding Latin American statistics must be made here also; many potentially useful statistics have had to be discarded because one source fails to correspond with another (and sometimes they conflict with themselves!) All the railways, being American or British-owned, had titles both in English and Spanish, but for the sake of consistency, only the Spanish names have been used in the text of this work. Similarly, all distances have been given in kilometres (1 km. = 0.62137 or approximately 5/8 mile) but to avoid excessively complicated exchange calculations, bearing in mind the fluctuating exchange rates, I have left money sums in the currencies in which they have come to me.