Kahului Railroad
| Kahului RR | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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 Kahului Railroad, 1911
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| Route length: | 25 km | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Gauge : | 914 mm ( English 3-foot track ) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The Kahului Railroad is a former railroad company in Hawaii ( United States ). They operated a 25-kilometer-long railway line in the gauge of three feet (914 mm) from Wailuku to Kuiaha on the north coast of the island of Maui with a few branches.
After the US government allowed the Hawaiian government to export sugar duty-free in 1876 , the sugar industry experienced a boom. The head of the postal authority of Kahului , Thomas H. Hobron, saw the need to transport the sugar quickly to the ports and opened the railroad from Wailuku to the port in Kahului under the name Kahului and Wailuku Railroad on July 17, 1879 . The first passenger train ran on July 29, 1879. Construction work on this section was finished in September . The line was the first public railroad in the Kingdom of Hawaii. Scheduled mixed trains ran Tuesday through Friday . On September 21, 1880 the extension to Pāʻia was opened. From July 1, 1881, the railroad operated under the name Kahului Railroad .
In 1884 the branch to Spreckelsville went into operation. From 1894 to the annexation of the archipelago by the USA in 1899, the railway used its own postage stamps for the transport of mail , which were produced by the US Postal Service. From 1906 the railway company expanded the port of Kahului.
The route was extended again on February 8, 1913. The railway reached Haʻikū and Kuiaha via a steel bridge over the Māliko Gorge. With a height of 70 meters above the valley floor, the bridge was the highest railway bridge in Hawaii, it was 208 meters long.
From 1959 the railway was the last public railway in the state of Hawaii and with a total of almost 87 years it was the railway with the longest service life. It was shut down on May 22, 1966 and then dismantled. The Māliko Bridge was also demolished. The tracks and some vehicles were used to build the Lahaina, Kaanapali and Pacific Railroad , a tourist railway in the west of the island.
Sources and further information
- Individual evidence
- ↑ Mike Walker: Comprehensive Railroad Atlas of North America. Pacific Northwest. SPV-Verlag, Dunkirk (GB), 1998.
- ↑ www.hawaiianstamps.com
- literature
- 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