My Dad is a train fanatic, he loves trains, has loved them since he was a kid. Lately he has been telling me about the incredible value of transporting things by rail, not just goods (which remains a ubiquitous service in the United States), but also people. He argues that its pretty crazy for us to let our rail infrastructure go into disrepair. Why? Because transporting things by rail is extremely energy efficient, and efficiency means cheaper goods, heftier bottom lines, and mitigated climate change.

Granted, currently we use diesel fuel or other relatively heavy polluters to power our freight, and diesel means pollution, which means more forced warming.  But the proposition that a diesel train engine, pulling hundreds of freight or passenger cars, could feasibly use a less polluting, carbon neutral fuel like cellulose-based ethanol seems a much more feasible than the concept of putting corn-based fuels in the tanks of Hummers.  I won’t dwell on the thermodynamics of it, not that I’ve done any calculations, but intuitively it feels right.

So, Bolivia is a worst case scenario of a country that has allowed its rail infrastructure to go into disrepair.  In the photo above, a track running through the heart of Cochabamba’s productive valleys is used to send a small, bus sized passenger train one-way the first day, and then back again on the second; rinse and repeat.  And this is a rebirth of these tracks, after improved roads came along the trains were abandoned altogether, the tracks fell into disrepair, and just recently the tracks were fixed and put back into use.  From analysis of aerial photos of these tracks, I know that they have been there since at least the early 1960’s.

Let’s analyze this for a moment.  Here is a country, bitterly patriotic over a historical wrong that robbed them of access to the sea, that has allowed hundreds of miles of train tracks, tracks that pass through some of the most agriculturally productive areas in the country, to go into disuse and disrepair.  Here is a country desperate for ways to transport products cheaply and cost-effectively, with the agricultural capacity to export the tons of surplus lost just because of poor post-harvest management, moving a bus-sized train across the tracks in one direction every other day.  Here is a country, suffering from a huge competitive disadvantage because of mountainous roads, incessant rains washing out those mountainous roads during certain times of the year, and the inevitable result is product inflation and enormously high transportation costs.  And while the politicians fight over this today and that tomorrow, a big part of the solution to the transportation problem is staring them in the face, in the form of miles of driven steel and railroad ties.  Once again, Bolivia defies logic.