High above Tocopilla, an iconic Boxcab leads a train down to Reverso. Photo by, David Gubler.
The Tocopilla railway was a mountain railway built to serve the sodium nitrate mines in the Toco area of the Antofagasta Region in Chile. With a gauge of 3 ft 6 in (1,067 mm), it ran from the port of Tocopilla on the Pacific coast up to a height of 4,902 feet (1,494 metres), with gradients up to 1 in 24.
The railway was built by a joint-stock company founded in London and was designed by William Stirling of Lima, with a detailed description of the initial operation of the railway published by his brother Robert in 1900.The line was electrified in the mid-1920s and expanded in 1930 with the addition of lines serving new areas of mining.
It continued operating into the 21st century, but was forced to close in 2015 when flash flooding caused numerous washouts on the electrified section of the railroad. With the declining prospects for nitrate, it was not economical for the line to be repaired. This photograph taken in 2013 shows a boxcab on the Tocopilla railway, leading a train down towards the coast.
Running from María-Elena to Tocopilla, it was the last operating nitrate railway in Chile, and the last operating section of a railway system that moved caliche ore to processing plants and nitrate to the port of Tocopilla. It was a magnet for rail fans before closing in August 2015 after severe rainfall damaged the tracks to the extent that the owner decided it was beyond economic repair.
Its history was influenced primarily by two factors: the rise and fall of the Chilean nitrate industry in particular SQM and its predecessors, and the evolution of railway traction technology from steam to electric and diesel motive power. In the 1980s, the Chilean government initiated a program to revive and modernize the Tocopilla Railway.
The railway was refurbished, and new locomotives and rolling stock were introduced.
Today, the Tocopilla Railway is operated by the Chilean state-owned railway company, Empresa de Ferrocarriles del Estado (EFE), and is used primarily for freight transportation, including the transport of copper and other minerals.
Source wikipedia CC BY-SA 4.0.