Add to the above the devastating 1934 hurricane that dumped as much as 25 inches of rain on El Salvador- All of it. That’s over two feet of rainfall in a couple of days. Not only were the roads, railroads and communications lines in country knocked out, but the outrushing water from inland scoured the coastline out to sea, villages, fishing boats, thousands of people. It put the port facilities at Acajutla out of commission too. It even changed the town where the hotel and dock were.
I don’t have wharf photos post hurricane to compare to the earlier images- I haven’t seen any pictures from any year or era after the 1934 hurricane featuring the 1881 wharf at all. Today, the remains of that wharf are pilings that extend out of a sand bar a foot at most. I have seen post flood erosion photos of Acajutla- The railroad grade is gone and in it’s place is an erosion channel that lowered the ground several yards and sloped down to the waterline. I think the flood not only washed out the town and the railroad, I think it swept away the wharf and filled the area previously used for loading and unloading watercraft with silt, effectively ending the FES’ shipping connection.
It might even be the reason FES got out of the steamship business. I read that FES had as many as four steamships in service along the coast from Costa Rica north to Mexico by 1911, with Acajutla as their home port. The 1934 flood probably killed off that half of the business when the catastrophe destroyed all transport and agriculture for that year and probably the next. No commerce out, little coming in after the relief effort wound down would have rendered the shipping line insolvent and left just the railroad, which was also badly damaged. No wonder the bond payments were defaulted in 1935 and FES went into receivership- It almost didn’t survive at all. Certainly any reserve funds they had disappeared quickly in the rebuilding after the flood, just like every other concern in the country.
There was a whole world we never got to see when railfans started to visit Central America in the 1950s and after- What the visitors saw by the 50’s was whatever had survived and whatever else came along as the country rebounded. I imagine that railroad operations, traffic patterns, incoming and outgoing carload freight, even the port facilities that FES served had changed greatly by then.
