Some Guatemala ng. pix *PIC*

I'm headed to Guatemala in a few days, and in preparation for the trip I have been making prints of a bunch of my old Fegua (Ferrocarriles de Guatemala) pix to take with me. It took only a couple of extra clicks to make jpegs, so here I am thanks to Don's new direct upload capability. From 1969 to 1980 I made a bunch of trips to Guatemala to chase the ng. there, and a friend and I also ran railfan tours there. Fegua was the last big show for steam, standard or narrow gauge, in North America, or at least "extended" North America. Fegua was the Guatemala part of the former International Railways of Central America, which had been nationalized in 1969. Indeed on my first visit to Guatemala there were no trains running because the IRCA was on strike. By the time I got back it was Fegua. It is not a coincidence that I started going to Guatemala shortly after the Rio Grande ng. shut down. Another Rio Grande connection is Bob Richardson helped point me to Guatemala, he had been there a few years earlier and owned some IRCA stock (there is quite a bit of IRCA stuff buried in the archives of the Colorado Railroad Museum). Fegua and the Rio Grande ng. had a lot in common, since both were "mainline" narrow gauge lines, the power was similar, and both were mountain railways that used two and three helpers on trains. Here are some pix that I will try to post more or less in order from the Mexican border north to El Salvador. North you say? One of the idiocyncracies of the IRCA is that Central America swings east at the Mexican border and Puerto Barrios on the Carribean is north of Tecun Uman on the Mexican border. So the railroad dispatched trains north from the Mexican border. This first picture is the local freight switching at Coatepeque, not too far from the border crossing.