This series of videos is amazing! I was just in Ecuador for the first time a few months ago and kept encountering the rails many times during our tour which centered on the areas of Quito to Riobamba. What an experience it must have been to travel these rails through towns, cities, back yards (front yards) and the vast country side up and down the mountains on what appears sometimes to be almost 7% grades. Yikes! I love the Cumbres and Toltec but nothing compares to this. It all feels like the whole operation was held together by a shoe string albeit with experienced workers doing their best to make it all work. There certainly are a lot of steam locomotives around the world in museums and tourist lines that come from downtown Philadelphia.
Thank you, it was an amazing trip and you are right about being run on a shoestring. A few years later they overhauled the engines and laid new track but sadly all trains stopped in 2020 and to my knowledge have not restarted since. The Cumbres & Toltec is a great railway, I did that in 1999 before I had a video camera.
This series of videos is amazing! I was just in Ecuador for the first time a few months ago and kept encountering the rails many times during our tour which centered on the areas of Quito to Riobamba. What an experience it must have been to travel these rails through towns, cities, back yards (front yards) and the vast country side up and down the mountains on what appears sometimes to be almost 7% grades. Yikes! I love the Cumbres and Toltec but nothing compares to this. It all feels like the whole operation was held together by a shoe string albeit with experienced workers doing their best to make it all work. There certainly are a lot of steam locomotives around the world in museums and tourist lines that come from downtown Philadelphia.
Thank you, it was an amazing trip and you are right about being run on a shoestring. A few years later they overhauled the engines and laid new track but sadly all trains stopped in 2020 and to my knowledge have not restarted since.
The Cumbres & Toltec is a great railway, I did that in 1999 before I had a video camera.