Panama Transportation Profile 2012

Transport in Panama is fairly well developed. The majority of the trips are done by car while a great part in public transport. The public transportation system is in need of modernization and other improvements.

Road :

Highways are somewhat well developed for Central America. In Panama City are 6 highways working being that the Panama-Arraijan Bridge of the Americas, Panama-Arraijan Centennial Bridge, Arraijan-Chorrera, Corredor Norte, Corredor Sur, and Autopista Alberto Motta

Panama's roads, traffic and transportation systems are generally safe, but traffic lights often do not exist, even at busy intersections. Driving is often hazardous and demanding due to dense traffic, undisciplined driving habits, poorly maintained streets, and a lack of effective signs and traffic signals. On roads where poor lighting and driving conditions prevail, night driving is difficult. Night driving is particularly hazardous on the old Panama City – Colon highway.

Buses and taxis are not always maintained in a safe operating condition due to lack of regulatory enforcement. Since 2007, auto insurance is mandatory in Panama.If an accident occurs, the law requires that the vehicles remain in place until a police officer responds to investigate. Traffic in Panama moves on the right, and Panamanian law requires that drivers and passengers wear seat belts.

Flooding during the April to December rainy season occasionally makes city streets impassible and washes out some roads in the interior of the country. In addition, rural areas are often poorly maintained and lack illumination at night. Such roads are generally less traveled and the availability of emergency roadside assistance is very limited. Road travel is more dangerous during the rainy season and in the interior from Carnival through Good Friday. Carnival starts the Saturday prior to Ash Wednesday and goes on for four days.

Panama Canal Railway Company

The Panama Canal Railway Company (reporting mark PCRC) is a railway line that links the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean across Panama in Central America. It is jointly owned by the Kansas City Southern Railway and Panama Holdings, LLC. The route stretches 47.6 miles (76.6 km) across the Isthmus of Panama from Aspinwall (now called Colón) to Panama City (by way of Gatun lake, Bujio, Barbacoas, Matachin, and Summit).

The infrastructure of this still functioning railroad (formerly the Panama Railway or Panama Rail Road) was of vital importance for construction of the Panama Canal over a parallel route half a century later. The principal incentive for the building of the rail line was the vast increase in traffic to California owing to the 1849 California Gold Rush. Construction on the Panama Railroad began in 1850 and the first revenue train ran over the full length on January 28, 1855. Referred to as being an inter-oceanic railroad when it opened,it was later also described by some as representing a "transcontinental" railroad despite only transversing the narrow isthmus connecting the North and South American continents.

The construction and opening of the Panama Canal

The construction of the Panama Canal was envisioned by John Frank Stevens, chief American railroad construction engineer, as a massive earth moving project using the railroad as efficiently as possible. Stevens wanted the railroad to use the biggest and heaviest duty equipment possible. The French equipment was nearly all judged obsolete, worn out, too light duty and nearly all their railroad equipment was not built for heavy duty use. Ironically, some of this French equipment was melted down and converted into medals presented to men working on the Panama Canal. The railroad, starting in 1904, had to be massively upgraded with heavy duty double tracked rails over most of the line to accommodate all the new rolling stock of about 115 heavy duty locomotives, 2,300 dirt spoils railroad cars and 102 railroad mounted steam shovels brought in from the United States and elsewhere. The steam shovels were some of the largest in the world when they were introduced. The new railroad closely paralleled the canal where it could and was moved and reconstructed where it interfered with the canal work. In many places the new Lake Gatun flooded over the original rail line and a new rail line had to be raised above the water by massive dirt fills and bridges. In addition to moving and expanding the railroad where needed, considerable track additions and extensive machine shops and maintenance facilities were added and other up grades were made to the rail system. These extensive improvements to the system were started at about the same time the extensive mosquito abatement projects were undertaken to make it safer to work in Panama. When the mosquitoes were under control much of the railroad was ready to go to work.

The railway greatly assisted the building of the Panama Canal. Besides hauling all the millions of tons of men, equipment and supplies the railroad did much more. Essentially all of the hundreds of millions of cubic yards of material removed from the required canal cuts were broken up by explosives, loaded by steam shovels, mounted on one set of railroad tracks, and loaded onto rail cars and hauled out by locomotives pulling the spoils cars running on parallel tracks. Most of the cars carrying the dirt spoils were wooden flat cars lined with steel floors that used a crude but amazingly effective unloading device—the Lidgerwood system. The railroad cars had only one side and steel aprons bridged the spaces between the cars. The rock and dirt was first blasted loose by explosives. Two sets of tracks were then built or moved up to where the loosened material lay. The steam shovels, moving on one set of tracks, picked up the loosened dirt and then piled it on the flat cars traveling on a parallel set of tracks. The dirt was piled high up against the one closed side of the car. The train moved forward as the cars were filled until all cars were filled. A typical train had twenty dirt cars arranged as essentially one long boxcar. On arrival of the train at one of the approximately 60 different dumping grounds a three-ton steel plow was put on the last car (or a car carrying the plow was attached as the last car) and a huge winch with a braided steel cable stretching the length of all cars was attached to the engine. The winch, powered by the train’s steam engine, pulled the plow the length of the dirt loaded train by winching up the steel cable. The plow scraped the dirt off the railroad cars allowing the entire train load of dirt cars to be unloaded in about ten minutes or less. The plow and winch were then detached for use on another train. Another plow, mounted on a steam engine, then plowed the dirt spoils away from the track.[15] When the fill got large enough the track was relocated on top of the old fill to allow almost continuous unloading of new fill with a minimum of effort. When the steam shovels or dirt trains needed to move to a new section, techniques were developed by William Bierd, former head of the Panama Railroad, to pick up large sections of track and their attached ties by large steam powered cranes and relocate them intact—without disassembling and rebuilding the track. A dozen men could move a mile of track a day—the work previously done by up to 600 men. This allowed the tracks used by both the steam shovels and dirt trains to be quickly moved to where ever it needed to go. While constructing the Gaillard Cut, about 160 loaded dirt trains went out of the cut daily, and returned empty—a train about every one and half minutes of the day.

The railroads, steam shovels, enormous steam powered cranes, rock crushers, cement mixers, dredges, and pneumatic power drills used to drill holes for explosives (about 30,000,000 pounds (14,000 t) were used) were some of the new pieces of construction equipment used to construct the canal. Nearly all this new equipment was built by new, extensive machine building technology developed and built in the United States by companies such as the Joshua Hendy Iron Works. In addition the canal used large refrigeration systems for making ice, extensive large electrical motors to power the pumps and controls on the canal's locks and other new technology. They built extensive electrical generation and distribution systems—one of the first wide scale uses of large electrical motors. Electrical powered donkey engines pulled the ships through the locks on railroad tracks laid parallel to the locks. New technology, not available in the 1850s, allowed massive earth cuts and fills to be used on the new railroad that were many times larger than those done in the original 1851-1855 construction. The rebuilt, much improved and often rerouted Panama Railway continued along side the new canal and across Gatun Lake. The railroad was completed in its final configuration in 1912, two years before the canal, at a cost of $9,000,000--$1,000,000 more than the original.