Bermuda Railway Pages

So why were there no cars in Bermuda? In one word: tourism.

Bermuda was small and conservative, and people were not keen on the idea of motor cars running up and down the colony’s narrow roads in any case, but it was the reaction of Bermuda's visitors that tipped the balance.

The rich Americans who came to Bermuda did so to get away from the bustle of the U.S. East Coast, where motorized traffic was becoming commonplace. They lamented the potential destruction of Bermuda’s special charm by automobiles, warning that if cars were allowed in to the “Isles of Rest”, visitors might have to find somewhere else to spend their winters.

In 1908, Mark Twain, a frequent and enthusiastic visitor, convinced another illustrious tourist, soon-to-be U.S. president Woodrow Wilson, to circulate a petition calling on the colonial government to ban the motor car and protect their island paradise. Read No Motors, Thank You! to find out more.

Encouraged by the petition, the Bermuda House of Assembly passed the Motor Car Act of 1908, which banned all private motor vehicles from the island. Banned they would remain until 1946.

The transportation problem remained, however.

The Bermudian elite didn’t want to lose the colony’s appeal to the Americans, hence the ban on motor vehicles passed in 1908. But the problem of transportation in Bermuda remained.

Some Bermudians wanted to rescind the motors ban and bring in motor buses, but others thought that a railway might fill the bill, making it possible to get from either end of the island to Hamilton in an hour rather than half a day. It wasn’t an easy decision, as Deciding to Build a Railway shows.

The railway ran as a single-track main line from its eastern terminus at the old capital of St. George’s, along the north shore of the main island to Hamilton, Bermuda’s capital and only city, and on through Paget, Warwick and Southampton parishes, to finally reach Somerset Island and its western terminus at Somerset Village. (The route is shown on the map that appears at the top of the Take a Trip on the Railway page.)

A possible extension of the railway beyond Somerset to the Royal Naval Dockyard on Ireland Island was never built, and while the idea was raised of extending the railway to Tucker’s Town, Elbow Beach, and into the centre of St. George’s, no such branch lines were ever added.

Essentially the railway’s cash-poor operations made any such extensions impractical.

People often think the railway must have been steam powered since it was built in the 1920’s. In fact, the railway company made the unusual choice of gasoline-powered engines. See the Rolling Stock page for details.

Bermuda has no natural sources of fresh water, other than rain collected on the roofs, so steam engines, with their high water requirements, would have been impractical. As well, during the debate over the railway, many people thought steam engines would be noisy and dirty. For a while the pro-railway forces were calling the proposed train a “bus on rails”, presumably because this sounded less disruptive.

They decided on gasoline-powered rather than diesel engines, because practical diesels only became available in the 1930s.

By the time World War II arrived, the railway was in difficult shape. It had never made a profit for its investors; at best its small operating profits were eaten up by maintenance costs. As well, its equipment was wearing out and spare parts were increasingly hard to get, as the gasoline-driven railcars and locomotives that had been state of the art in 1931 had since been surpassed by diesel-electrics. Once the war began spares were almost unobtainable. The war also led to staff shortage as railway workers were called up to serve in the armed forces.

At the same time, however, the railway was more needed than ever before. Although the tourist trade had dried up, the construction of the American bases led to greatly increased railway traffic, both freight and passenger, so much so that the railway actually made money for two or three years. It purchased two diesel-electric locomotives from the United States to meet the demand, and by the end of the war they were pulling almost all the trains.

Once the bases were completed, though, traffic began to shrink to more traditional levels, leaving the railway in the same uneconomic situation. Worse, the line’s many wooden trestles were reaching the end of their practical life and would soon have to be rebuilt or replaced.

For more detail, see World War II on the Bermuda Railway.

In 1946 the Bermuda Government purchased the Bermuda Railway from the private company which owned it for £115,000. The decision to close the railway came two years later. In 1948 the government sold all the railway rolling stock and other equipment, right down to most of the rails and wooden sleepers, to the government of British Guiana (now Guyana), which ran that colony’s railway. The Bermuda Government received £86,000 for the railway equipment and material.

Unlike Bermuda, British Guiana had decided to renew their equally worn-out railway rather than close it down. Of course, British Guiana had a much longer history of railway operations; the first railway line there opened in 1848. The British Guiana Railway kept running until 1972.