St. Kitts Scenic Railway

20 December 2022 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: General, Bon voyage Reading Time:  4 minutes

© flickr.com - David Stanley/cc-by-2.0

© flickr.com – David Stanley/cc-by-2.0

St. Kitts Scenic Railway is a 29 kilometres (18 mi) long narrow gauge railway line along the coastline of the island of St. Kitts in the eastern Caribbean, with a track gauge of 762 mm (2 ft 6 in). The original track was laid from 1912 to 1926, to deliver sugar cane from the plantations to the new centralised sugar mill in Basseterre. The sugar mill was built by a group of investors in 1912, to reduce processing costs and increase profitability by applying the principle of economies of scale, due to a sugar price drop caused by the worldwide introduction of sugar beets. Previously, each plantation had its own sugar mill. The first section of the railway line, from the Factory Pier to the St. Kitts Basseterre Sugar Factory, with a West Line branch running 4 miles (6.4 km) to Palmetto Point at Trinity and a North Line branch running out to Mills’s at Bourryeau Estate, was completed on 28 February 1912. It was celebrated with a special train carrying invited dignitaries. The railway was then operated seasonally from February to June for the annual sugar harvest.   read more…

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