About this journey

Francisco Mora station takes its name from the Argentine engineer who led Argentina's delegation on the Comisión Mixta Ferroviaria Argentino-Boliviana and whose departure from Bolivia in 1948 was mourned in Santa Cruz for the commitment he had shown to the project. That joint commission, established on 2 February 1942, was the body charged with building the railway that would eventually link Yacuiba, on the Argentine border, with Santa Cruz de la Sierra across 536 kilometres of Bolivian lowland. The line was inaugurated in 1957, financed by Argentina and repaid by Bolivia in petroleum under the terms of the Tratado de Vinculación Ferroviaria signed on 10 February 1941.

The route runs through the Bolivian Chaco, a broad lowland plain that stretches toward the Argentine frontier. Intermediate stations include Charagua, Boyuibe, and Villamontes, spaced across the southern sector of the Ferroviaria Oriental network. That network totals 1,244 kilometres of metre-gauge track, of which the southern sector accounts for 539 kilometres. Today the line carries a single weekly Mixto — a combined passenger-and-freight service — in each direction, a frequency described in early 2024 as the lowest level of passenger traffic in Bolivian railway history.

The GE U10B locomotive hauls the train north toward Santa Cruz de la Sierra, the eastern terminus of the network and the city that the railway has connected to Argentine Atlantic ports via a link with Belgrano Cargas since the line's inauguration. The journey moves from the flat Chaco scrubland of the south into the broader lowland approaches of Santa Cruz, ending at a station whose name marks the geographic and historical centre of Bolivia's eastern railway network.