PANAMA CITY — It’s not every railroad that displays its stuffed and mounted roadkills in a passenger terminal — the toothy end of a crocodile sliced in half by its wheels, an ocelot’s cousin killed by its cowcatcher.
Then again, the Panama Canal Railway is pretty unusual, chugging from the Pacific to the Atlantic in one hour, on a 47-mile route that parallels the Panama Canal and cuts through dense tropical jungle, the Miami Herald reported.
Not to mention its triple role as tourist attraction, executive commuter train and cross-isthmus hauler of shipping containers that merchant ships cannot or will not take on their transit of the canal.
”Unique is one way to put it,” said Thomas Kenna, marketing director of the U.S.-owned, one-year-old railroad that has Panama abuzz with visions of increased income from tourism and a new way to handle cargo.
Tourists riding the double-decker observation car on the 7:15 a.m. weekday run from Panama City on the Pacific to Colón on the Atlantic can see alligators, iguanas and snakes cuddling with the sun-warmed rails ahead.
Or they can stay in the five Amtrak-made club cars, with mahogany paneling, emerald-green lampshades and pots of strong coffee, for a ground-level look into some of the most pristine jungle in the Western Hemisphere.
Birds flit about, and the morning light barely penetrates the jungle canopy, casting a brownish tinge on vines dangling from 50-foot trees to the surprisingly thin underbrush below.
Giant freighters loaded high over their gunwales with up to 4,000 shipping containers sail at a snail’s pace through the cafe-con-leche waters of the canal, outpaced by small private fishing and sail boats.
And on the Atlantic side of the ride there’s Gatun Lake, the highest point of the trip and the world’s largest artificial lake whose waters raise and lower the freighters 85 feet above sea level. The train averages 150 passengers a day, mostly Panama City executives paying up to $40 round-trip to visit the Colón Free Zone, a gritty complex of firms that import from Asia and export to Latin America and the Caribbean.
Railroad tracks follow much of the right-of-way as the first railway across the Panama isthmus, built in 1855 by John Steven to speed the passage of East Coast Americans heading for the Gold Rush in California.
The U.S. government later rebuilt and relocated part of its route as it built the Panama Canal at the turn of the 20th century, but the railroad fell into disuse when the U.S. government began returning canal installations to Panama in the early 1980s. It stopped running altogether in the early 1990s. Tourism and commuting were supposed to be small sidelines when the Panama railroad project was officially launched in 1998 by the Kansas City Southern Railroad and MI-JACK, a Chicago rail yard operator.
In the meticulously precise world of international shipping, where a freighter capable of carrying 4,400 containers can lose $50,000 on a day’s delay, the railroad figures it can make money by playing several angles.
Freighters that now sail from Asia carrying only 4,000 containers to clear the canal’s 40-foot draft limit can load the other 400 and send them across on the train. Shippers that run ”long-line” freighters from South America’s Pacific coast to the U.S. Eastern Seaboard and Europe can avoid the stiff canal transit fees by running two shorter ”loop lines” on either side of the canal and sending their containers by train. The new railway was designed to move up to 6,000 containers a week, but traffic is now running at only 500-600 per week because of delays in the planned expansion of Balboa port on the Pacific, where most of the ships arrive from Asia.
”When that Balboa bottleneck is cleared we expect business will soar,” Kenna said.