La Guaira and Caracas Railway

However, the city is at an altitude of 3,000 feet (910 metres), so the line extended to 23 mi (37 km) to mitigate the gradients.

A railway offered an easier way to move goods to the Venezuelan capital and to export the country's agricultural produce,[1] Stephenson and his father had set up a company in England to build steam locomotives.

However, the locomotives of the 1820s would not have coped with the climb to Caracas, and he proposed that the trains should be pulled by animals ("blood traction").

In 1880, during the second presidency of Antonio Guzmán Blanco, the Venezuelan Government authorised a British company to construct and operate the railway.

The Venezuelan engineer Jesús Muñoz Tébar reported: I think it necessary to advise the same company commissioned with those works, of the convenience of bringing with them at least two workmen from the ironworks sector to assemble them and to bring the necessary tools and spare parts for those important parts that break or damage easily and which are impossible to manufacture in the country.