The Railway in Trinidad - Part II

By: Michael Anthony

The smooth opening led the government to heed the clamour of  the ordinary people as well as the planters, for a line to San Fernando, the second town. This certainly was a line that was going to boost the economy in a big way. For it would help not only the sugar planters nor cocoa planters, but all along the line of the Gulf of Paria were a number of people who would like to get to know their neighbours by travelling easily to places like Couva, Chaguanas, and San Fernando.
    And as for taking cane to the factories, and about the up and coming influence of cocoa? If the Arima line was vibrant this line  would be busy and complex.

     For there were scores of sugar estates and sugar factories all over this area, at Felicite and Woodford Lodge in Chaguanas, then there was Caroni, Brechin Castle, and Freeport with its Friendship Estate, Couva with its Victoria, its Exchange, and Forres Park, and around San Fernando itself there was Usine Ste Madeleine, Mon Repos, Retrench, Cocoyea, Ne Plus Ultra, Plein Palais, La Carriere, Vista Bella, Bon Accord, etc.
     A line to San Fernando was started around 1878, and the Prince of Wales and his brother who came here in 1880 rode on part of that line on their way to the Pitch Lake and afterwards on their way to Misson, which was renamed “Princes Town” in their honour.  (When they were here that January the line was ready up to Couva).  The railway workers worked relentlessly on that line, and in some cases, as at Savonetta, fixing the rails almost along a wall they had built on the edge of the sea, and by slow degrees they kept on approaching San Fernando. There was the matter of building a station for it and an approaching  low range of hills which barred the way to the San Fernando wharf and which would have had to be removed anyway was leveled amply enough to allow for railway lines to the wharf as well as to accommodate a railway station. The rails were laid down and a railway station was built and at length, in mid-April, the train rolled into San Fernando.  The San Fernando extension of the railway was inaugurated on Monday March 17, 1882.
       And that could have been the end of the laying down of the lines of the Trinidad Government Railway had there been industrial content. But the planters were not satisfied. The cocoa planters, although they had seen the Port-of-Spain/Arima line as helping the sugar industry more than the cocoa had nevertheless refrained from complaining. But to them the line to San Fernando was unashamedly a “sugar line.” So a hue and cry went up deploring government’s bias against cocoa growers and pointing to the great cocoa-producing estates of the Sangre Grande region as the///// which had no means of getting their produce to market. The cry must have been more special as one of the land-owners there happened to  marry a daughter of Governor Sir William Robinson. Anyway, the Trinidad Government Railway yielded and in 1897 an extension was made to Sangre Grande. The cocoa planters saw more success the following year, when cocoa, as a crop making a growing impact on Trinidad’s economy, showed it was worth making noise. In 1898 and extension was made from a railway junction in Cunupia named after the governor of the day, Sir Hubert Jerningham, to a place that was new in cocoa growing, which was Tabaquite. That line was called the Caparo Valley line.  But by the first decade in the 19th century the oil areas, new on the scene, decided to make their voices felt. There were many oil wells around the southern town of Siparia, and at the same time Siparia was the head of bustling commerce in the vegetable market — the produce of Penal and Debe, for instance, with its rice, cucumbers, bodi, sim, water-melon, in fact the veritable food basket of the entire region, stretching to San Fernando. In 1913 the Government extended the San Fernando line to Siparia, and as a result, the mood of the cocoa planters of Tabaquite, industrious, hard-working, and now moving down towards in order to plant more cocoa, the vicinity of a river called the Rio Claro could have pelted the cocoa pods at the Red House so furiously angry they were. And of course they were too far from Port-of-Spain.
        To appease them Governor George Le Hunte allowed for an extension of the Caparo Valley line to a village that came to be called Rio Claro. Then the First World War broke out and with it, Peacetime on the railways.