Antioquia Railway
in Colombia
The Antioquia Railway (Spanish: Ferrocarril de Antioquia) is a historic railway system in Colombia of freight and passenger trains that joined much of the central regions of the Antioquia department along the Magdalena River, and ultimately extended to provinces located south of the department, including Caldas and the Valle del Cauca. It took 55 years to build: from 1874 to its opening on 7 August 1929. The Antioquia Railway was for decades an important link among regions that had previously been isolated and was a large contributor to economic development in the region. With the construction of alternative forms of transportation, especially roads, the use of the train declined in the 20th century. The railway was officially sold in 1961.
The railway was owned and operated by the department of Antioquia. Its purpose was to link Medellín, the commercial center of the department, with the river port Puerto Berrío, located by the Magdalena River. Prior to the railway, Antioquia was a region known only for its gold mining. After the region became more interconnected, there was a boom in almost all areas of the economy, including livestock and agriculture in the Nus region, textiles in the Medellín Valley, and coffee production in the whole department.
The historic Medellín station of the railway still exists in Plaza Cisneros.
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This entry incorporates text from “Antioquia Railway” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.