Empresa Matte Larangeira 2-8-0 Locomotives in Brazil

Class America (Locobase 15192)

Data from Baldwin Locomotive Works Specification for Engines as digitized by the DeGolyer Library of Southern Methodist University Volume 66, pp. 426+ and Volume 79, pp. 315+ William Alfred Reid,"A New Gateway to the Heart of South America", reprinted from Bulletin of the Pan American Union, Volume 46, No 2 (February 1918), pp. 192+ (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1918); and "Guafra, Paraná" in Wikipedia at [],_Paran%C3%A1, last accessed 16 June 2022. (Thanks to Teemu Koivumaki for his 10 June 2022 mail giving additional details of the EML's organizational structure and history.) Works number was 53546 in August 1920, 56944 in August 1923, 60899 in July 1929.

EML's yerba mate growers decided to build a railway that linked the upper and lower sections of the Parana to avoid the miles of narrow defiles with waterfalls that constituted the river at that point. The Bulletin of the PAU article gives full details of the difficulties of river transport in the area and describes the railway. (Photographs accompanying Fields's report clearly illustrate the impossibility of river transport in such water.)

Built roughly as a north-south line down the left bank of the Parana. In the North, Porto Mojoli at the Salto (waterfall) de Guaira. (The port later took the name Guaira, which Wikipedia claims derives from a Tupi language phrase meaning"difficult of access.") Porto Mendes provided the terminus of the 60 km (37 miles) long, rode on 20 lb/yard (10 kg/metre) rail, and bent around very tight radii of 50 metres (164 feet).

These small wood-burners were ideally proportioned for such a lightly built road. Their Rushton Improved spark-arresting cabbage stacks did what they could to prevent fires. They remained in service until 1944, when they were sold to the Servito de Navegatpo da Bacia do Prata until they were retired in 1959.

(In 1984, the huge Itaipu Dam drowned all of the navigational impediments in a 1,350 sq km (520 sq mi) lake.