Santos–Jundiaí Railway

FACTSFact sheet

01A wall between the coffee and the sea

The Serra do Mar runs parallel to the São Paulo coast and rises almost in one go. In the description that the engineer Daniel Makinson Fox presented in 1870 to the Institution of Civil Engineers, in London, it rises "abruptly" to at least 2,500 feet, some 760 meters, covered in forest. For centuries the way down had been by Indigenous trails, the Calçada do Lorena, from 1792, and the Estrada da Maioridade, from the 1840s, all on foot or on muleback.

On the other side lay the São Paulo plateau, where coffee was spreading fast. Fox put the province's production at 80 million pounds a year. All of it had to go down to Santos. The idea of a railway had existed since the 1830s, was taken up again by the Baron of Mauá in 1853 and 1854, and stalled once more with the Crimean War. In April 1856, the Empire gave the concession to Mauá, to the Marquis of Monte Alegre and to councilor José Antônio Pimenta Bueno.

02Numbers that did not add up

The concession guaranteed 7% interest, for a term later extended to 90 years, on a maximum capital of 2 million pounds sterling, and Fox records that it was "distinctly understood" that there would be no guarantee for additional capital. Mauá handed the project to the Scottish engineer James Brunlees, who sent Fox, aged 26, to Brazil at the beginning of 1856.

The instruction from London was to lay out an ordinary locomotive line. Fox says that one look at the terrain was enough to conclude it would not fit the money. The comparison he made is with the Dom Pedro II Railway, which climbed the range near Rio de Janeiro, where the mountain is lower: on the same standard, the São Paulo climb would require at least 26 miles, some 42 kilometers of continuous grade, and would cost £1.5 million on the range alone. Brunlees chose the shortcut: inclined planes, with a gradient of 1 in 10, worked by stationary engines.

The survey took some fifteen months. According to Fox, the team spent three weeks at a time inside the forest, in huts thatched with palm leaves, and came out "blanched from want of sunlight".

03Four inclines and a cable

What was built was four inclines with a gradient of 1 in 9.75, a little over 10%, with lengths between 1,781 and 2,139 meters by Fox's measurement, totaling some 8 kilometers. At the top of each one, an almost level landing of some 76 meters held the engine house: a pair of steam engines of 158 nominal horsepower, fed by five boilers. The cable, of steel wire, was tested to 35 tonnes and lasted about two years.

The system had an English name, tail-end. One train was attached to one end of the cable and another to the opposite end: while one went up, the other came down, and the weight of the descending one helped the engine. In the middle of each incline the rails split into a passing loop so the two could cross. Each train carried three wagons and a brake van with a clamp able to bite the rails and stop the train within a few meters, used also on foggy days, when the rail became slippery.

In 1869, according to Fox, each trip lifted at most 40 tonnes and took some 15 minutes per incline, an hour for the whole range. The locobreques, the small locomotives that gripped the cable and that today are associated with the funicular, only arrived with the second system, around the turn of the twentieth century.

04The mountain that kept sliding

The biggest problem was not the grade, it was the ground. The cuttings reached 75 and 95 feet deep, and the slopes, 330 feet long. Fox writes that "embankment after embankment was carried away during construction", sometimes after it was finished. The answer was to drain everything: collect the water from the slope above the line and carry it across in stone channels, face the embankments and shore up the cuttings with dry-stone walls up to 60 feet high. In all, there were 1.2 million cubic yards of excavation, close to 920,000 cubic meters.

At the foot of the fourth incline, a valley was crossed by the Grota Funda viaduct, some 215 meters long and 185 feet high at its deepest point. There was no scaffolding: a cable was stretched from one side of the chasm to the other and the iron columns were lowered along it, piece by piece. The first stone was laid in July 1863, and the first train crossed in November 1865. The whole line opened on 16 February 1867. The contract allowed eight years, until the end of 1867, and the contractor Robert Sharpe & Sons received from the government a bonus of £43,750 for finishing ten months early.

05Who opened the way down the range

Fox estimated that the largest number of men on the work at any one time was "probably about 3,500 of all nationalities and shades of colour". The most numerous, according to him, were Portuguese and islanders from the Azores and Madeira; there were Germans, Brazilians who left the fields for wages and went back at planting time, and Englishmen as foremen and engine drivers. Wages ranged from 4 shillings and 6 pence to 6 shillings a day. The total number of workers was not recorded.

Fox also wrote that, although Brazil was a slaveholding country, the concession required the use of free labor. The documents tell another story. In an official letter of July 1863 to the president of the province, the company's superintendent, J. J. Aubertin, admitted that the work had been using enslaved people for more than three years, "not without some tacit permission" from the government. The accident reports of the inspecting engineer Wallace da Gama Cochrane, from 1861 to 1863, name ten enslaved workers. The historian Paulo Rodrigues de Andrade, who found these papers, concludes that the presence of enslaved people on the work was the rule, not the exception.

Nobody published how many died. What exists are names: João, drowned in January 1861; Benedicto Cotovi, burned by gunpowder in September of the same year; two enslaved men killed in 1862, one crushed by a rock, the other drowned; the Portuguese José Fernandes, who died two days after an explosion in a mine on the range, in October 1862.

06The richest railway and the second funicular

The final bill came in above forecast, but not far off. The contract with Sharpe was for £1,745,000, and the contractors received £1,817,917. With the interest paid during construction, Fox arrived at £31,570 per mile, which comes to nearly £2.7 million for the line; the guaranteed capital in 1869 was £2,650,000. With coffee, the São Paulo Railway came to be described in the British technical press as perhaps the richest railway in the world.

Traffic grew so much that, around the turn of the twentieth century, the company doubled the line and opened a second funicular, the Serra Nova: five inclines of 8%, some 10 kilometers, engines of 1,000 horsepower and an endless cable gripped by the locobreques. The two systems worked side by side for decades. On 13 September 1946, at the end of the 90-year concession, the railway passed to the federal government and became the Estrada de Ferro Santos a Jundiaí.

In the 1970s, the Federal Railway Network dismantled the first funicular and, in 1974, opened a rack railway on the same bed, with Japanese locomotives. The second funicular stopped for good in 1976 or in 1982, depending on the source. It is on the inclines of 1867 that MRS freight trains still go down the range.

07The village at the top and the return of the funicular

At the top of the range, the 1861 work camp became a village. The company needed to keep the men who ran the engines up there, and in 1897 it opened the Vila Martin Smith, laid out on a grid, with wooden houses allotted according to the company hierarchy. Alto da Serra is today Paranapiacaba, a district of Santo André. It was listed as heritage by Condephaat in 1987 and by IPHAN, bought by the city in 2002 and placed by Brazil on UNESCO's Tentative List in 2014. In July 2026 the restoration began of the metal footbridge that links the two parts of the village, budgeted at R$18 million.

On 31 March 2026, Governor Tarcísio de Freitas spoke about the passenger train the state is studying between São Paulo and Santos: "Incredible as it may seem, what is looking most viable is to restore the funicular that has been abandoned for a long time". The study remains open, with a public hearing planned for 2027, and there is no defined route. The idea of hauling trains up the range by cable, which the British chose for lack of money, is back on the table a century and a half later.

MYTHSWhat people say and what the record shows

• What people say

  The railway was built with free labor only, because the concession prohibited slaves.

  What the record shows

  The prohibition existed, and the resident engineer wrote that it was respected. But in an official letter of 1863 the company's superintendent admitted to the government that it was using enslaved people "not without some tacit permission", and the accident reports from 1861 to 1863 name ten of them.

• What people say

  The inclined planes had a slope of 10 degrees.

  What the record shows

  The gradient was 1 in 9.75, that is, about 10%: the train rose 1 meter for every 9.75 traveled. Ten degrees would be almost 18%.

• What people say

  Since 1867 the trains were hauled by the locobreques.

  What the record shows

  In the first system, the cable was attached to an unpowered brake van. The locobreques, small locomotives with a grip to seize the cable, were bought for the second funicular, the Serra Nova, opened around the turn of the twentieth century.

• What people say

  The railway was built without explosives, because of the unstable slope.

  What the record shows

  The description of the work speaks of mines (blasting headings) and tunnels, and the accident reports record workers burned by gunpowder and one killed by an explosion in a mine on the range, in 1862.

• What people say

  The budget was 200,000 pounds and the cost doubled.

  What the record shows

  The guaranteed capital was 2 million pounds. The contract was for £1,745,000, and the total cost, with the interest paid during construction, came to nearly £2.7 million.

QUESTIONSFrequently asked questions

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SOURCESSources

1. Daniel Makinson Fox, "Description of the Line and Works of the São Paulo Railway in the Empire of Brazil", Minutes of Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers, vol. 30, 1870 — upload.wikimedia.org
2. Paulo Rodrigues de Andrade, "Trabalhadores escravos nas obras de construção da SPR na década de 1860", Aedos (UFRGS), v. 7, n. 17, 2015 — seer.ufrgs.br
3. Cecília Rodrigues dos Santos, Claudia Lage and Gustavo Secco, "Patrimônio: São Paulo Railway 150 anos", Arquitextos, Vitruvius, 2017 — vitruvius.com.br
4. Thaís Fátima dos Santos Cruz (FAU-USP), "Funiculares da vila ferroviária de Paranapiacaba: reminiscências, remanescentes e permanências", 2011 — patrimonioindustrial.cl
5. Thaís Fátima dos Santos Cruz, "No meio do caminho... uma serra, a ferrovia, o café e uma vila", Agro-Industrial Heritage Seminar, IAU-USP — iau.usp.br
6. Grace's Guide, "Sao Paulo Railway" — gracesguide.co.uk
7. Grace's Guide, "James Brunlees" — gracesguide.co.uk
8. Decree-Law No. 9,869, of 13 September 1946, Chamber of Deputies — www2.camara.leg.br
9. City of Santo André, "A Vila" (Paranapiacaba) — www3.santoandre.sp.gov.br
10. City of Santo André, "Paranapiacaba terá passarela restaurada com investimento de R$ 18 milhões", 2026 — web.santoandre.sp.gov.br
11. Metrô CPTM, "Tarcísio cita reativação de funicular como alternativa para Trem Intercidades até Santos", 31 March 2026 — metrocptm.com.br
12. Via Trolebus, "O que sabemos sobre o Trem SP-Santos (Atualizado 2026)", 2026 — viatrolebus.com.br
13. UNESCO, Tentative List, "Cultural Landscape of Paranapiacaba: Village and railway systems in the Serra do Mar Mountain Range, São Paulo" — whc.unesco.org
14. Office for National Statistics (via officialdata.org), UK consumer price index, 1867–2026 — officialdata.org
15. Wikipedia (Portuguese), "São Paulo Railway" and "Funicular de Paranapiacaba" (starting point) — pt.wikipedia.org

Images

• Fig. 01 — The São Paulo Railway line on the slope of the Serra do Mar, around 1900, photographed by Guilherme Gaensly: Guilherme Gaensly (Museu Paulista da USP) · Public domain
• Fig. 02 — One of the engine houses at the top of an inclined plane, on an early twentieth-century postcard. From here the steam engine hauled the cable: Autor não identificado (cartão-postal, Museu Paulista da USP) · Public domain
• Fig. 03 — General view of the inclined planes on the range, on an early twentieth-century postcard: the cuttings in the slope, a tunnel and a wagon right on the incline: Autor não identificado (cartão-postal, Museu Paulista da USP) · Public domain
• Fig. 04 — One of the iron viaducts of the inclined planes, on an early twentieth-century postcard: Autor não identificado (cartão-postal, Museu Paulista da USP) · Public domain
• Fig. 05 — Shed with the São Paulo Railway mark and the year 1900, in Paranapiacaba, photographed in 2020: Lima Marcos Antonio · CC BY-SA 4.0
• Fig. 06 — The Paranapiacaba yard and the clock tower in 2018, at the top of the range, where the trains began their descent: Igor Rando · CC BY-SA 4.0