Verapaz 2-6-0 Locomotives in Guatemala

Class 3 (Locobase 15426)

Data from Baldwin Locomotive Works Specification for Engines as digitized by the DeGolyer Library of Southern Methodist University Vol 79, pp.94. See also the Ak' Kutan website's account of "La Verapaz in lost siglos XIX y XX" (in Spanish), [], and the English-language biography of Erwin Paul Dieseldorff, part of the "Folklore of the Verapaz" on CobanAV.net ([]), both last accessed 12 September 2013. Works number was 61105 in November 1929.

Ak' Kutan's account explains that after Guatemala secured its independence from Spain in the mid 1820s, it sought to attract settlers from northern Europe to offset Spanish influence. In 1834, the legislature passed a law that encouraged such settlement by offering to prospects, among other inducements, a tolerant view of their mostly Protestant religion. A more concrete attraction were the relatively few constraints on resource exploitation of wood and mineral products, the development of river and lake navigation, exemptions from customs duties, and liberal import and export of their products.

Finding a scarcity of indigenous laborers, the immigrant land holders began buying more land not for cultivation but to gain control over the inhabitants' labor. Laws required the inhabitants to work a certain number of days per year on the road network, which benefited coffee plantations, and commanded the military to send soldiers in to enforce the work requirement.

CobanAV.net's account credits the construction of the the FC de Verapaz to German immigrant E P Dieseldorff, who began construction in 1896 during the best years for coffe prices of a railway between Tucur+ with Panzós, about 60 km (37.3 miles) away at the head of the Polochic river, which feeds Lake Izabal. He also directed construction of the cart road between Tucur+ and Coban. " Both of these projects," says CobanAV.net, "were heroic undertakings hewn through malarial swamps and blasted out of sheer mountainsides, where each season's work was often wiped out by the next season's rains."

Dieseldorff's character gets high marks from the CobanAV.net biographer: "Albeit a shrewd businessman, Dieseldorff was regarded as being scrupulously honest and incorruptible. While quick to spot new opportunities or to press an advantage, his chief reliance was on the high quality of his product." Over the decades he amassed a large bibliography of his own archeological research in pre-Columbian settlements.