Hawaii Railway

Hawaii Railway
Legend Mahukona HI Honoipu HI Hoea Mill HI Hoea HI Union Mill HI Kohala Landing Kohala Mill Kohala HI Hālawa HI Niulii HI

The Hawaiʻi Railway is a former railway company in Hawaii ( United States ). It operated a railway line in the track width of three feet (914 mm) of Mahukona after Niulii on the northern tip of the island of Hawai'i . The owner Samuel Gardner Wilder was also Interior Minister of the Kingdom of Hawaii and gave himself the concession for the railway on July 5, 1880. On August 13, 1880, King Kalakaua signed a subsidy contract that guaranteed Wilder $ 2,500 per mile once he completed the track. Wilder then founded the Hawaiian Railroad on October 20 . In August 1880 he lost his ministerial post shortly after changing the railroad laws in his interests. He became the largest shareholder in the newly formed railway company. His original plan was to lay railway lines across the island.

history

The first plans for the railroad were drafted in 1878 when a new international treaty between the Kingdom of Hawaii, ruled by King Kalakaua , and the United States made sugar export attractive. Wilder, the owner of the Likelike steamer , suggested the route to Kohala , although Samuel Parker of the Parker Ranch would have preferred the route from Hilo to Hamakua .

Construction began in Mahukona in 1881. Wilder had previously expanded the port of Mahukona. It is a protected harbor that can be used all year round. He built warehouses and numerous quays there . He employed 100 Chinese workers and 20 white overseers to build the railway line . The Chinese made $ 17.00 a month and lived eight in tents. The work was delayed by an epidemic of smallpox which imposed long quarantine periods on immigrants , but in March 1881 the first sleepers and rails were laid.

The Kinau steam locomotive crossed a wooden bridge with a passenger train in 1882

The line was opened in sections in the course of 1882: in March 1882, 18 kilometers were operational. The first steam locomotive was obtained from the Baldwin Locomotive Works and was named Kinau after Wilder's wife. The steam locomotive pulled trains with sugar cane and passengers into the protected harbor of Mahukona, from where the steamer Likelike took over the further transport.

In May 1882, 24 kilometers had already been completed. Shortly thereafter, Wilder ordered two more locomotives, the A Ke Ahi (fire thing) and the Kauka . The former was named after Wilder when he first came to the island. On January 10, 1883, the 32-kilometer route was completed.

In May 1883 the railway company organized a ceremonial trip for King Kalakaua so that he could unveil the original statue of King Kamehameha I in Kapaau , which had previously been lost at sea and was then found and restored. The people of Kohala did their best to prepare for the royal visit, and the king, in turn, impressed them by arriving in a Russian gunboat that fired gun salutes. The cars made of teak were then given the name Kalakaua Cars .

One of the trestle bridges

The Kinau steam locomotive with a freight train loaded with sugar cane in the mountains

Due to the relief of the volcanic island, many cuttings and valleys had to be overcome, which was done with a total of 17 trestle bridges . The highest of the bridges was 25 meters above the valley floor, the longest bridge was 170 meters long. The route was mainly used for freight traffic, but there was also modest passenger traffic. There was a chronic shortage of drinking water as well as a lack of water for the steam locomotives. Water had to be brought in by ship from Honolulu and then transported by mule from the port to the camp and train station.

In 1884 North Kohala produced 10,000 tons of sugar and made over $ 40,000 in profit. The railroad carried 20,000 tons of freight and 6,000 passengers. There was even a simple telephone network that connected all the stops with one another, in which several calls were often conducted simultaneously on one line. During this time, the more powerful Kalakaua locomotive came to the island to replace the original Kinau locomotive , which was then brought to Maui in exchange. The Kalakaua was baptized with the new name Leslie .

After Wilder's death in 1888, Charles L. Wight, who had been the railroad company's manager from the start, became its new president. When analyzing the financial development so far, it became apparent that some notes and documents about the ownership shares had been lost. In fact, Wilder had owned all of society without anyone knowing it. This revelation and other developments stifled the original enthusiasm for the railroad. There was a creeping loss of income.

On December 17, 1897, the company had to be reorganized in Hawai'i Railway for financial reasons . Shortly after all the sugar factories in the Kohala area and the railway were bought up by the Kohala Sugar Company , the railway company became Mahukona Terminals Ltd. on September 30, 1937 . reorganized. In 1939 the Kohala – Niulii section had to be closed for economic reasons. Scheduled operations between Hawi Mill and Mahukona ended in 1942, but the route continued to be used occasionally for sugar cane transports. The rest of the line was shut down on October 29, 1945. In Mahukona, a short section of the port remained in operation until 1955.

Location of the rolling stock

The Leslie , which had previously been used as Kalakaua on Maui , and which was the first locomotive on the Hawaiian Islands, was shipped to California around 1959, where it was given the undignified name Little Toot . It was partially renovated there with three Kalakaua Cars . A newer locomotive was moved to Colorado. The remains of two old locomotives may still be in Kohala. One of the teak passenger cars ended up in the Maui Museum.

literature

• Mike Walker: Comprehensive Railroad Atlas of North America. Pacific Northwest. SPV-Verlag, Dunkirk (GB), 1998.
• George H. Drury: Hawaiian Railroads , in: William D. Middleton, George M. Smerk, Roberta L. Diehl (Eds.): Encyclopedia of North American Railroads. Indiana University Press, Bloomington IN / Indianapolis IN 2007. ISBN 978-0-253-34916-3
• George W. Hilton: American Narrow Gauge Railroads. Stanford University Press, Palo Alto CA 1990. ISBN 0-8047-2369-9

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Veronica S. Schweitzer: Sugar and Steam in Kohala . In: Coffee Times . January 1998. Retrieved July 27, 2010.
2. ^ JC Condé: Narrow gauge in a kingdom: the Hawaiian Railroad Company, 1878-1897 . Glenwood Publishers, 1971.
3. ↑ Anne M. Prescott: Makapala-by-the-sea: Hawaii . Hawaiian Gazette Company, 1899, p. 19.