Scenic railways of the Americas and New Zealand: built for gold, silver and ports

Why the White Pass & Yukon Route, Royal Gorge Route, Curitiba–Paranaguá line and TranzAlpine were built, how they survive today and what to watch in their cab rides.

Railways that were built to carry something

None of the four lines in this guide was built for the view. The White Pass & Yukon Route was laid to supply a gold rush, the Royal Gorge line was fought over by companies racing to silver mines, the railway from Curitiba to Paranaguá was built to bring a crop down to a port, and New Zealand's Midland Line, which the TranzAlpine uses, was meant to link the coal and timber of the West Coast with Canterbury. The scenery was the obstacle, not the attraction.

That history still shapes them. Each was built through ground that later engineers might have avoided, because the cargo justified the cost. Each lost much or all of its original traffic, and each survives partly or wholly because visitors now ride it. Knowing why they were built makes the cab-ride videos more than a sequence of views. GONOM's guide to how mountain railways climb covers the engineering; this one is about the purpose.

White Pass & Yukon Route: a railway for a gold rush

In 1897 and 1898 tens of thousands of prospectors landed at Skagway and hauled their supplies over White Pass towards the Klondike goldfields. A railway was the obvious business, and British investors organised by the Close Brothers bank financed one. The contractor Michael Heney chose 3 ft narrow gauge, work began in May 1898, and the last spike was driven at Carcross on 29 July 1900. After the rush the line carried ore and freight, and in the 1950s it became an early pioneer of container shipping, with its own container ship from 1955.

Metal prices collapsed in 1982, the mines it served closed, and the railway shut that October. Cruise lines calling at Skagway pressed for its return, and it reopened for visitors in 1988. In 1994 American and Canadian civil engineers named it an international historic civil engineering landmark. In the video, watch the track become a shelf above the Skagway River, the old steel cantilever bridge at Dead Horse Gulch, bypassed in 1969 but still standing, the border at the summit and the long shore of Lake Bennett, where the stampeders once built boats.

Royal Gorge Route: the silver war in a canyon

In the late 1870s silver made Leadville, high in the Colorado Rockies, the place every railway wanted to reach, and the shortest way there ran up the Arkansas River through the Royal Gorge. The canyon is more than 300 m deep and in one place barely wide enough for the river. The Santa Fe and the Denver & Rio Grande both claimed the route, and the Royal Gorge War of 1878 to 1880 was fought with lawsuits, rival grading crews and armed men, until the Treaty of Boston in 1880 gave the line to the Rio Grande.

It became part of a main line. Passenger trains used it until 1967 and freight until 1989, and since 1999 it has been run as a heritage excursion railway from Cañon City. In the video, look for the point where the canyon walls close in and the sky narrows to a strip, the Royal Gorge suspension bridge far overhead, and the Hanging Bridge of 1879, where the track runs under A-frame girders braced against the rock because there was no room for anything else.

Curitiba to Paranaguá: a plateau and its port

In nineteenth-century Paraná, the plateau around Curitiba produced erva-mate, the leaf used for mate tea, and the way to sell it was through the Atlantic port of Paranaguá. Between the two stands the Serra do Mar, an escarpment of close to 1,000 m. The engineers André and Antônio Rebouças campaigned for a railway, construction began in 1880 in the presence of Emperor Pedro II, and the line opened on 5 February 1885. According to the Paraná state government, at the engineers' request it was built without enslaved labour, unusual in Brazil at the time.

The full line runs about 108 km with 13 tunnels and 41 bridges and viaducts, through the largest continuous area of preserved Atlantic Forest in Brazil. Freight still uses it, while the Serra Verde Express tourist trains run the roughly 70 km from Curitiba to Morretes. In the video, the plateau section is flat and quiet; the descent begins near Roça Nova. Watch for the São João bridge, the Carvalho viaduct clinging to the cliff and the granite peaks of Marumbi across the valley.

TranzAlpine: a coast-to-coast line that took decades

Canterbury and the West Coast of New Zealand's South Island are divided by the Southern Alps. In 1884 a Royal Commission chose the direct but difficult route up the Waimakariri and over Arthur's Pass, but the government of the depression years could not pay for it. A private company, the New Zealand Midland Railway Company, took on the job in 1885 and ran out of money. Work stopped in 1895, the Crown seized the company's assets, and the Public Works Department resumed in 1898. Trains reached Arthur's Pass in 1914, and the line was only complete when the Otira Tunnel opened in 1923.

Coal from the West Coast still travels over the Midland Line, and since 1987 the TranzAlpine has run as a sightseeing train between Christchurch and Greymouth. In the winter cab video, watch for the long straight run across the Canterbury Plains, the climb into the Waimakariri gorge with its tunnels and the tall Staircase Viaduct, and the 8.6 km Otira Tunnel. Behind each train a door closes at the portal, so that the train pushes its diesel fumes ahead; on the far side the country turns to wet green rainforest.

From freight to visitors

Put side by side, the four lines show two ways a railway outlives its first purpose. On the Curitiba–Paranaguá line and the Midland Line, freight trains still run, and the tourist services share the track with them. On the White Pass and the Royal Gorge, freight has gone completely, and the railways survive because people want to ride them; in Skagway's case, because cruise ships bring the passengers to the platform.

Either way, what you see in the films was built to carry heavy loads cheaply, and the ledges, tunnels and bridges were justified by gold, silver, mate and coal. When you watch, it helps to ask what the line was carrying when it was new, and why the builders took it through this valley rather than another. The answer is usually the reason the line is worth watching today.