About this journey

Vitória do Mearim station sits in the state of Maranhão, in Brazil's Northeast region, and serves as one of the most significant stops on the Estrada de Ferro Carajás — the Carajás Railway — which links the states of Maranhão and Pará. The line is operated today primarily as a freight corridor, a legacy of privatisation that dismantled the national passenger network between 1999 and 2007 following decades under the state-owned RFFSA, which was established in 1957.

The Carajás Railway runs on metre-gauge track — 1,000 mm — the gauge that forms the largest share of Brazil's rail network. Passenger services on this route are rare by the standards of intercity rail elsewhere, and the line's maximum operating speed is 60 km/h, a pace shaped more by infrastructure than intention. Hauling the consist on this journey is an SD70M locomotive, a type more commonly associated with heavy freight. The roughly two-hour run eastward toward Auzilândia passes through the interior of Maranhão, a state where rail remains one of the few connections across a landscape that the sources available do not describe in detail — the route speaks for itself across the footage. The journey captures something that intercity rail travel in Brazil rarely offers today: an unbroken cab-ride perspective along one of the country's most storied freight corridors.