Thread: Company Hopes Faster, Safer Trains Will Stop Immigrants From Reaching U.S.

Taming 'The Beast': Company Hopes Faster, Safer Trains Will Stop Immigrants From Reaching U.S.

By Bryan Llenas
Published July 24, 2014 Fox News Latino


On Board 'The Beast': Immigrants Make Perilous Journey To U.S.

Bound for the U.S., about 450,000 migrants travel through Mexico every year and many do so by illegally riding on top of a freight train, known as “The Beast” or “The Death Train.”


A railroad company in Mexico plans to invest more than $150 million over the next five years to boost train speed and security in an effort to deter immigrants from illegally boarding their freight trains to reach the United States.

It is estimated between 400,000 and 500,000 mostly U.S.-bound migrants travel through Mexico every year and many do so by illegally riding on top of a freight train, known as “The Beast” or “The Death Train.” Most of the immigrants travel hundreds of miles on the train from El Salvador, Honduras or Guatemala to reach northern Mexico and then rely on smugglers, or coyotes, to illegally get them into the U.S.

Maria Isabel Pons, the deputy director general of Ferrocarriles Chiapas Mayab (FCCM), the company that owns the freight trains, told the Mexican newspaper Reforma that it plans to invest millions of dollars over the next few years to triple the speed of its freight trains from about 6 miles per hour to 18.

“The moment you raise the speed, you make the route safer, because they are not going to have the opportunity to climb onboard,” Pons told Reforma about the migrants. “People have been boarding the train because the quality of the railroad has diminished, the quality of the operation has diminished, and therefore the velocity of the train has diminished.”

Pons said the company plans on also eliminating the use of screws on their train tracks, opting instead to weld tracks together usingplanchuelas, or metal plates, that connect the rails. She said this will stop thieves from stealing portions of the train track, forcing trains to stop so that immigrants can climb aboard.

The company also plans on adding a Traffic Control Center, which would monitor the track and freight trains via new surveillance cameras. The hope, Pons told Reforma, is to find out where immigrants are boarding the trains and alert authorities.

In 2013, FCCM acquired 370 miles of railway in Southeast Mexico near the Guatemalan border, but it is still waiting on the Mexican government to approve and transfer control of the track to them.

The journey aboard "The Beast," or “La Bestia” in Spanish, is a perilous one. Often times, migrants must board 10 to 15 different trains over hundreds of miles to reach the U.S. border. Those who make the journey, most of them teenagers traveling alone, are targeted by smugglers, are kidnapped or raped by criminal gangs or face extortion by drug cartels or public officials. U.S. officials have recently enlisted the help of a U.S. advertising firm to create a song called La Bestia, "The Beast," to dissuade migrants from hitching a ride onboard the notoriously dangerous "Death Train." It is currently being played on 21 radio stations in Central America.

Derailments along "The Beast's" route are common. Earlier this month, a cargo train carrying about 1,300 Mexican and Central American migrants heading to the United States border derailed in Southern Mexico. No one was injured, according to Reuters. Authorities blamed heavy rain in the area for the derailment.

Another derailment in August of 2013 killed at least six people.

http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/new...migrants-from/

I'm surprised the train company hasn't added passenger cars and sold tickets to ride inside the train in a nice seat.

by Michelle Moons 26 Jul 2014
breitbart



Central Americans headed for the U.S. may be looking to other modes of transport in the future, as Mexico’s “The Beast” train is slated to triple its speed in the next five years.

Heavily used and a common source of injury to those catching a ride illegally, “La Bestia,” as it is known in Spanish, will receive a $150 million makeover courtesy of Ferrocarriles Chiapas-Mayab (FCCM).

Improvements are reported to include increasing speed from 10 to 30 kilometers (18.6 mi) per hour to deter illegal riders, changes to metal plates intended to prevent tampering and derailments, and installing surveillance cameras to monitor activity around the tracks. Though FCCM acquired 370 miles of railway in 2013, the Mexican government has not yet approved transfer from the previous operator.

Deputy director general for FCCM, Maria Isabel Pons, told the Mexican newspaper Reforma that some people will remove pieces of track in order to get the train to stop so they can hop on, but this then has the potential to cause train derailments.

Last August, a derailment of “The Beast” cost the lives of at least five and injured 18 of the 250 Central Americans who hitched a ride, according to the Associated Press. Seventeen of those taken to hospitals were Hondurans, ranging in age from 19 to 54, as listed on a release Mexican official Felipe Puente put out. While the tracks were rebuilt in 2009 and recently inspected, Mexican officials asserted that shifted rails, due to heavy rains, contributed to the derailment.

In response to the proposed rail improvements, Breitbart Texas border security expert Sylvia Longmire stated:

"One has to ask why Mexico hasn't already taken this step, considering it would have helped from a commerce perspective to get freight to the U.S. in a quicker fashion. However, it's an encouraging sign that the Mexican government is willing to invest in a concrete step that would take one enormous transportation option away from illegal immigrants heading north, and one that could also save many lives.

On the other hand, there's nothing to say that migrants won't try to board and ride the train anyway, possibly making it even more dangerous. Migrants would also be forced to seek other transportation options that could be even more dangerous; however, more likely than not, the speeding up 'The Beast' could potentially be a big deterrent."

http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-T...grant-Activity

The Beast is owned and run by a Mexican wholly owned subsidiary of Kansas City Southern, a U.S. train company that acquired the Mexican equipment and routes in 2005 to create a “NAFTA Railroad” that was intended to fit into a multi-modal transportation technology so Chinese companies could deliver products into the heartland of the United States as an alternative to utilizing the West Coast ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.

Mexican prosecutors have filed criminal complaints charging railroad with complicity in violations of the civil rights of the thousands of unaccompanied minors from Central America illegally hitching rides on the train in their efforts to cross into the U.S. over the border with Mexico.


http://www.alipac.us/f12/mexicans-bl...uthern-307120/