About this journey

The journey begins at Governador Valadares, a city whose growth was shaped directly by the railway: when the Estrada de Ferro Vitória a Minas was routed through the area around 1907, it consolidated what had been a scattered settlement, and the first station was inaugurated on 15 August 1910. Today the line is administered by the mining company Vale and carries both freight and daily passenger services through the Rio Doce valley.

The EFVM runs on metre gauge — 1,000 mm — the same track used by Vale's heavy iron-ore trains on the same corridor. Traction is provided by a GE BB40-9WM locomotive, part of a General Electric family developed specifically for EFVM operations, succeeding earlier BB40-8M orders placed in the early 1990s. The line's maximum operating speed is 60 km/h, so the roughly two-and-a-half-hour run to Aimorés is paced by the valley rather than by urgency, keeping the Rio Doce in view for much of the route. Near the journey's end, the river's course has been altered by the Aimorés Hydroelectric Power Plant, whose dam redirected the Doce away from the town itself. The Rio Doce is also the waterway that bore the tailings from the 2015 Samarco dam collapse in Mariana — recorded as Brazil's worst industrial environmental disaster, with more than 55 million cubic metres discharged — lending the valley a sombre context beneath its quiet landscape.