Banana Trains - All aboard!

¡Vamonos!

• Porter Mogul
• Banana Car
• Aerial Tractor, with yours truly
• Banana Monorail or Cablevia
• Human Power
• Brasilian Banana Railways
• United Fruit Plantation Railways

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A little three foot gauge Porter Mogul of the United Fruit Company hauls a banana train at Bananera, Guatemala in 1965.

Railroads were once used to haul bananas, both within the farms and from the plantations to the ports, but today trucks handle most of the business to dockside, where palletized or containerized banana boxes are loaded on reefers for the water journey to overseas markets. (Photo by E. Trelor)

The old "Gros Michel" bananas where shipped on the stem. Here a mule cart loads fruit into a banana car of the Cia AGRICOLA, a former subsidiary of the United Fruit Co. in Guatemala. (W.C. Witbeck)

Yours truly plays "maquinista" (engineer) on a monorail at the former Coto Plantation of the United Fruit Company near Golfito, Costa Rica, in 1970. In use at that time were old-style Chiquita and Amigo labels. (J.K.)

These little aerial guideway systems, which are also called "cablevias" or "funiculares," are commonly used on most plantations to haul the freshly cut fruit from the fields to the packing sheds.

Here a worker "drives" a trainload of bananas en route to the packing shed of an Ecuadorian farm. On this particular day in 1998, they were packing Bonita 4011's for the U.S. and Enano's for Japan. (J.K.)

Human power at a farm near Baba, Los Rios, Ecuador. That day in 1997 they were boxing Dole for Europe and Sharbatly for Saudi Arabia. (J.K.)

Before aerial cableways became common, narrow gauge "Decauville" type light railways were used by some growers. Few survive today, but in coastal São Paulo, Brasil, one can still find banana trains hauling fruit from field to packing shed, powered by diminutive internal combustion locomotives from Henschel, O&K, Planet, Symplex and others. The locomotive on the right is a Symplex from Fazenda Jatobatuba. (J.K.)