Why 100-Year-Old American Locomotives Were Still Working in Cuba

Somewhere in eastern Cuba, in the hills outside a town called Rafael Freyre, a Baldwin 2-8-0 Consolidation locomotive built in 1907 was still hauling loaded sugarcane wagons through the countryside well into the 21st century. The same wheel arrangement, the same boiler design, the same hand-operated steam brakes that an engineer in Philadelphia would have recognized a hundred years earlier. And this was not a museum piece running on special occasions. This was a working freight locomotive, doing the same job it was built to do, on tracks that had not been replaced since the 1880s.