About this journey

Governador Valadares station sits in the Vale do Rio Doce, roughly 316 km east of Belo Horizonte, on a railway that gave the city its form. The Estrada de Ferro Vitória a Minas reached this area around 1907, consolidating what had been a small settlement whose coffee growers and timber operations needed a route to the ports of Espírito Santo. The first local station opened on 15 August 1910, and in the early 1920s the urban core still occupied only the narrow strip between the Rio Doce on one side and the railway track on the other.

Leaving the city, the cab looks out across terrain that is predominantly undulating — around 60% of the surrounding municipality falls into that category — with the Rio Doce close by and the isolated mass of the Pico da Ibituruna, at 1,123 m, visible across much of the route before the valley bends it from view. The locomotive on this journey is a GE BB40-9WM, hauling through a landscape shaped by pre-Cambrian river erosion into the sequence of gentle hills and broad valley floors that define this corridor all the way to Desembargador Drumond.