Estrada de Ferro Leopoldina
The Estrada de Ferro Leopoldina is a historic railway company in Brazil .
history
The construction of railway lines in Brazil in the 19th century was linked to coffee and its transport to seaports. That is why it was the coffee barons that drove the construction of railroad lines in Brazil . The various mining companies were added later.
In 1871, a decree was passed authorizing the President of the Province of Minas Gerais to pay a subsidy per kilometer of railway line and to grant inexpensive loans for the construction of new lines to a company that built the town of Leopoldina with Porto Novo do Cunha (today Além Paraíba) on the border with the province of Rio de Janeiro , where the Estrada de Ferro Dom Pedro II already ran.
Also with a royal decree (No. 4.914) on March 27, 1872, the engineer Antônio Paulo de Mello Barreto was then approved to found a company for the construction of an ice rink called Companhia Estrada de Ferro Leopoldina on June 5, 1872. The studies for the first section of the route with a length of 38 kilometers began in the same year on October 10, 1872. In March of the following year, construction work began under engineer João Gomes do Val.
Construction progressed at great speed, and the line was inaugurated on October 8, 1874 in the presence of King D. Pedro II (1840–1889) and later reached Leopoldina. Five steam locomotives with eight passenger cars and 48 freight cars ran on this first route.
Following this phase, the company went through various financial crises, which led to the transfer of ownership of the company to British creditors. At the end of this process, The Leopoldina Railway Company Ltd was founded in London, which resulted in the company being taken over in 1898. The new owners began to carry out restructuring and modernization. They also acquired a further 38 smaller railway lines in the center and north of the state of Rio de Janeiro, in the southeast of Minas Gerais and in the south of Espírito Santo such as. B. the Estrada de Ferro Mauá (the first railway line in Brazil). The Leopoldina company achieved a total route length of 3,200 kilometers.
In the period before and during the Second World War , the financial situation of the Leopoldina company deteriorated again with the decline in coffee cultivation in the entire region. Since the company did not recover from this, it was transferred to state ownership in the 1950s and called itself Estrada de Ferro Leopoldina (EFL). It was included in the Ferroviária Federal (RFFSA) speech in 1957. This phase was marked by the decline of rail traffic and the progressive closure of sections of the route. Today, under the private management of the company Ferrovia Centro Atlântica (FCA), only a fraction of the former railway lines are in operation. Large parts of the Rio de Janeiro area were taken over into the operation of suburban suburban trains.
Overview of the railway lines
The following railway lines were in operation by the Leopoldina company:
- Linha de Carangola
- Linha de Três Rios-Caratinga
- Linha do Norte
- Ramal de Guia de Pacobaíba (EF Mauá)
- Ramal de Sao José do Rio Preto
- Linha de Cantagalo - (Saracuruna-Visconde de Itaboraí-Friburgo)
- Ramal de Teresópolis
- Linha do Litoral
- Linha do Centro
- Linha de Campos - Miracema
- Linha de Manhuaçu
- Ramal de Sao José do Rio Preto
- Ramal do Sumidouro
- Ramal de Paraoquena
- Ramal do Poço Fundo
- Ramal de Campista
- Ramal de Santo Amaro de Campos
- Ramal de Barão de Sao José (Colomins)
- Ramal de Santa Maria Madalena
- Ramal de Manoel de Morais
- Ramal de Juíz de Fora
- Ramal de Cabo Frio (EF Maricá)
- Ramal Sul de Espírito Santo