About this journey

Salto station stands as one of the oldest points on the Linha Itu-Jundiaí, inaugurated on 2 April 1873 as part of the original trunk line of the Companhia Ituana de Estradas de Ferro. The railway was built to serve a booming coffee economy whose traffic had long outgrown the old land and river trails of inland São Paulo state. In 1892 the Companhia Ituana merged with the Estrada de Ferro Sorocabana, and by 1914 the line through Salto had been reclassified as the Ramal de Campinas of the Sorocabana network. Passenger services at Salto ended in 1976 and freight in 1985, when a rectified alignment bypassed the station entirely.

Decades later the corridor found a second life. Reconstruction of the Itu–Salto section as a tourist railway began in 2008, carried out by the municipalities of Itu and Salto with support from DNIT. The tourist service, named the Trem Republicano and operated by Serra Verde Express, was inaugurated on 19 December 2020. This cab ride follows that restored route behind locomotive GE U5B 3003, running the full length to Itú — a city that in 1873 had hosted the first Republican Convention of Brazil, making the railway corridor a thread connecting the region's economic and political history.