Rail transport in Mexico
Political upheaval continued to stifle progress, and the initial segment from Veracruz to Mexico City was inaugurated nine years later on January 1, 1873 by President Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada.
President Lerdo and his successor Porfirio Díaz encouraged further rail development through generous concessions that included government subsidies for construction.
At the beginning of his first term Díaz inherited 398 miles (640.5 km) of railroads consisting almost exclusively of the British-owned Mexican Railway.
[1] By the end of his second term in 1910, Mexico boasted 15,360 miles (24,720 km) of in-service track, mostly built by American, British and French investors.
The plan, implemented in 1909, created a new government corporation, Ferrocarriles Nacionales de México (FNM), which would exercise control of the main trunk rail lines through a majority of share ownership.
[6] From Saltillo, Coahuila to Concepción del Oro, Zacatecas, the FCNM built narrow-gauge tracks in 1903 to service mining operations.
The company was initially called Transportación Ferroviaria Mexicana (TFM), but was renamed Kansas City Southern de México (KCSM) in 2005 when KCS bought out TMM's interests.
[13] Despite Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim's expressed interest in investing in high-speed rail,[15] no progress was made on the proposal.
They also included the Tren Maya, which would run throughout the Yucatan Peninsula, and whose construction eventually began in 2020, and a Mexico City-Querétaro high speed rail line.
A consortium of China Railway Construction Corporation, Prodemex, Teya and GHP was awarded the contract to build the Mexico City-Querétaro high speed rail, at a cost of $3.75 billion dollars.
[16] In 2015, Mexico opened a new tender, which was again revoked, leading to the Mexican government paying China Railway Construction Corporation a 1.31 million USD indemnification.
[18] In September 2018, President-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced a US$7.4 billion plan to build a tourist and freight railway on the Yucatán Peninsula.
The project, named the Tren Maya, began construction in 2020 and will connect Palenque to Cancún, but remains controversial with environmentalists and indigenous rights activists.
It has an estimated cost of 1.2 billion dollars to revive and expand the abandoned corridor under a private-public partnership with the company Caxxor Group, as part of the USMCA agreement.
[24][25][26][27] In December 2023, passenger service on Line Z was inaugurated as part of a larger scheme of expanding rail transport in Mexico.
