The Biggest Train in the World

Iron Ore Train, Itabira, Minas Gerais

I was driving from Itabira, city of Iron, to Ipatinga, city of steel. As I rounded a bend, I was dazzled by shimmering ranks of train wagons. I stopped, sat on the verge, and watched the drama unfold. Like a long-drawn-out sequence in a Tarkovsky film, the train imperceptibly rumbled past with the ruthless determination of a mutant reptile. Serpentine, silver, two and half kilometres long and propelled by two engines, it was transporting an estimated thirty thousand tons of iron ore to the Tubarão port outside of Vitoria, capital of Espirito Santo. From there it will begin its long journey to China.  It was just such a train that Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902-1987) described in the mournful poem A Montanha Pulverizada. One of Brasil’s most revered poets, he was born in Itabira when it was still a small picturesque colonial era town. All this was to change dramatically with the discovery in the area of immensely rich iron deposits, and it was in Itabira that the giant international corporation Companhia Vale do Rio Doce was founded in 1942. Heralded as one of the motors of national economic development it immediately began the intensive mining of surrounding mountains. One of these the Pico de Cauê was discovered to be composed almost entirely of solid metal. And so, the explosions grew louder, the air thickened with gritty dust and the plants suffocated under a blanket of red earth. The young Drummond looked on in anguish as his childhood panorama of majestic peaks and woodland slowly vanished. As if struck down by a mysterious crippling disease, Pico de Cauê shrank and shrank until there was nothing left but a crater. Forever traumatised by the environmental and social devastation, he was to spend most of the rest of his life in Rio de Janeiro. An antique photograph of his hometown apparently hung on a wall in the living room, but it was a hometown that he was never to return to. Later that evening I sat on an elevated terrace watching dusk fall over the hillsides, that largely barren and bereft of vegetation seemed to tremble like a starving beast, bones protruding through scanty layers of skin. The clouds darkened. The wind picked up and within minutes a death miasma of thick iron dust clogged my eyes, throat, and ears. Itabira is a town that has been eaten by a mine and has one of the worst respiratory health problems in the country. But there is too much money to be made and there is no stopping the Leviathan Vale, masters of the universe that will continue mining till the end of the earth.