La Paz’s train station has been closed for passenger services since 1996. The abandoned building is now engulfed by the construction site of the city's new teleférico and yet there are clear reminders of the station's original purpose around every corner.

Most obvious are the unwanted graffitied trains scattered about among the hundreds of millions of dollars worth of brand new Austrian cable car equipment. In a last-ditch attempt to be remembered, the old train tracks peek out from beneath the muddy tyre marks left by heavy cranes and clumsy diggers. The gutted station building displays a tellingly empty timetable. A sign creaks in the wind, welcoming passengers that are gone by now, people who have left almost twenty years ago. This was the starting point of the Andean Network, this was Kilometer 0.

The railway ran from La Paz to the Chilean port of Arica and became one of the most well known lines in the history of Bolivia's rail network. The infamous line never truly flourished due to the continuously poor relationship between Bolivia and Chile, the challenges of building on the Andean terrain and a lack of essential funding. It only peaked in its functioning for a very brief period of time.

The 440km train line was built under the Chilean Government's supervision. It was part of a peace treaty signed in 1883, following The War of the Pacific. Bolivia had lost its coastline as a result of the war and Chile offered to build a railway to its nearest port as reparations.}

It was agreed that Chile would be responsible for maintaining the tracks on both sides of the border. However, over the years, Bolivians began to suspect that their neighbours were not fulfilling this agreement. It seemed Chile had somewhat forgotten to maintain the 233km of railroad on the Bolivian side.

As the train tracks deteriorated so did the popularity of the train as a form of transport. There was a decline in funding that was vital to maintain tracks across the country. In the 1990's, a study claimed that $40 billion were needed in order to restore the rapidly dilapidating train tracks. In the years that followed, most of the industries in Bolivia were privatized, among those was the rail network. As a result, many lines across Bolivia were left hopelessly abandoned, rusting and decaying as the years crept by.

One hundred years have passed since the line’s official inauguration in 1903. Last year, when the centenary celebration was held at Arica, further conflict and controversy surrounded the shared railroad. Chile’s President, Sebastian Piñera, attended the event. Nowhere to be seen was the Bolivian delegation. In a later statement, justifying his lack of attendance, Evo Morales boldly challenged his Chilean counterpart. He dared him to ride the Bolivian track with him in order to prove whether the line was in full working order. Piñera accepted the challenge, but the ride is yet to be taken.

Beyond the tense relationship between Bolivia and Chile, the development of better roads and highways also contributed to the fall of the La Paz- Arica line. Records indicate that the surface of roads in Bolivia have grown ten fold over the past four decades, whereas the number of working locomotives in the country have more than halved. Transport via trucks for passengers and cargo quickly took over as the chosen form of transportation for Bolivians.

In some parts of the country, the abandonment of the rail network is itself a tourist attraction. From all over the world, tourists come to see the train cemetery in Uyuni, for example. This particular line, built by British engineers, was used by mining companies for the transportation of minerals to ports on the Pacific coast. The line collapsed in the 1940's when the mining industry crumbled.

Unlike in Uyuni, the old train station in La Paz will once again fulfill its true purpose. It will become a thriving centre of transportation.

This time, it won't be the clatter of wheels on tracks that will bring the station to life, but the almost silent swoop of the new 'teleférico'. A journey from the station will no longer mean thundering through La Paz’s rugged landscape. Instead you will swiftly glide through the thin atmosphere over the city.

As you rise above town you’ll see the station building still standing. It has been left virtually undisturbed amid the heavy construction which surrounds it. Considered an important part of Bolivia’s past, permission to demolish the building is unobtainable.

People say the empty building will be transformed into a museum of sorts. Around which topic?, nobody seems to know. For now, the teleferico takes centre stage as La Paz’s train station is regenerated. While the station’s original purpose may be overshadowed by the excitement of the new cable cars, the grand building will always serve as a reminder of the La Paz- Arica line.

These famous blue buses began circulating around the city of La Paz in 1938, and have since become iconic. They barely need signs anymore as they are instantly recognisable from as far as the eye can see; even their grumble is distinctive.

The first buses were known as the Chaucheros, a word now used to denote the knitted purses cholitas carry around (presumably because the passengers who traveled on them were tightly crammed together). Today, with its 51 years in uninterrupted service, ‘El Inmortal’ remains the oldest of the 80-strong fleet of #2 buses, though several aged others are at least four decades old.

The bus route could just as easily serve as a tour service through the Old Town of La Paz. It is a journey which begins and ends in the same stop as it cuts through the eternal traffic jam on Buenos Aires avenue, traverses the Max Paredes district with its busy merchants, trundles along the innumerable schools on Avenida Armentia, and winds through the residential Sopocachi district. It then repeats the same cycle.

One never knows what to expect; a miner´s protest, a civic parade or the majestic Señorial Illimani morenada dancers passing by. Yet the main road the #2 bus has had to travel down has, without a doubt, been the passage of time. Military coups and numerous strikes have left their mark on their rusted bumpers and peeling blue paint. Inside the bus, faith in the Copacabana Virgin is expressed through numerous ornaments. The historical Bolivian claim to the sea also finds a voice on stickers on the enormous rearview mirror. That and more, on the Colectivo 2.

Arriving or Leaving?

It is true. The windscreen indicates that the bus is either ‘arriving’ or ‘leaving’. At first, it is impossible for one to understand what this means. The fluorescent ‘Llegada’ (‘arriving’) sign indicates that the bus is heading towards its stop, whilst the ‘Salida’ (‘leaving’) sign indicates the bus is heading towards the city center; a puzzle which can, perhaps, only be truly understood by those who live in Sopocachi, where the bus changes its direction.

The Colectivo 2 survived the city’s trams during the ‘40s, later to endure the minibus invasion during the ‘80s and ‘90s. Today, in the times of the teleférico and Puma Kataris (refer to other articles in this issue to learn more), it will have to adapt to maintain its sustained popularity, especially when Supreme Decree 890 comes into effect in 2018. This law prohibits the movement of vehicles which are more than 12 years old. For the time being it is fair to say these ancient buses are neither coming nor going, but always somehow there.

From El Alto to Zona Sur

La Paz: a unique city, scrambling its way up slopes so steep that only a madman, you would think, could possibly imagine building anything here. And its transport problems may well be unique as well. Many paceños have been saying for years that they’re fed up with a transport system that includes 853 minibus routes and yet somehow manages to be unreliable, uncomfortable and incredibly slow. And when you’re sat crushed up on an overcrowded bus, inching its way along at a fraction of the speed you could walk, you can understand why.

But how to go about finding a solution? Imagine plotting the most common journeys made in La Paz and El Alto on a map, then linking them up with a few brightly coloured lines. You might well end up with something resembling the plans for the new teleférico, a cable car system stretching from the heights of El Alto to the chic neighbourhoods way down in the valley of Zona Sur. It’ll be the perfect way (it is hoped) to sail over the congestion, taking in some stunning views of the city and its mountainous surroundings. That is, if you have time in the ten minutes that it will take to travel the length of the red line from La Paz’ Estación Central up to 16 de Julio in El Alto. With 440,000 people commuting between the two cities every day, it’s clear that this development can’t come soon enough.

As reported by The Gondola Project, a website dedicated to coverage of cable car transport projects, this will be the world’s largest mass-transit cable car system (with three lines and a total distance of over 10km, eleven stations, 427 cabins and a capacity of 18,000 passengers an hour). For those of us who imagine cable cars as nice little tourist attractions, the idea of doing your daily commute on one is utterly alien. Yet this is what is envisaged here: Diego Prieto of túatú, the team in charge of marketing the teleférico, says that there are definitely short-term plans for more lines. “There’s been talk of seven, talk of eleven. We just don’t know the exact figures yet.” Imagine an underground system like the London tube or the Paris Métro, then string it on wires above the city. That’s the vision.

Although cable car technology has been around for a long time, the concept of using it as a mass transport system is pretty new, and it’s easy to overlook how big a step for the city this actually is. Marketing strategies like colouring the three lines (and their cabins and stations) red, yellow and green (the colours of the Bolivian flag) naming it “Mí Teleférico” and organising children’s drawing competitions and an Instagram photography prize seem pretty obvious, pretty straightforward, until you realise just how important this “appropriation”, as Prieto describes it, actually is. “This is a new kind of transport system in Bolivia… for a lot of people, this will be the first time they ever go in a cable car.”

And so this is a hybrid campaign, making use of an integrated web of social media sites and a team that’s been steadily working its way around the city explaining the “ABC of the teleférico”, down to things as basic as how to get into a car. Prieto describes the “mentality change” that the teleférico will bring, referring to the WiFi access, bicycle parking and virtual libraries that will form part of each station. I can’t help but think that this is a little optimistic, being reminded of the image doing the rounds of the Internet of a minibus strung up on a cable, and an unfortunate passenger doing what comes naturally to any user of transport in La Paz, and, seeing that they are passing conveniently close to where they’d like to get off, declaring “¡Aprovecharé!”

This is perhaps the greatest problem that the team behind the teleférico has to face: not so much the technical problems of building around a crowded city or at this altitude, for, as Steven Dale of The Gondola Project explains, “Cable car systems have been designed to operate in some of the harshest alpine environments in the world. The technology is uniquely suited to deal with extreme elevation changes and altitude challenges.” No, the fact is that the residents of La Paz are used to their transport being slow and uncomfortable, but exceedingly convenient. For anyone used to structured bus services with stops and timetables and maximum numbers of passengers, coming here feels like a step back to the days of public transport past. And yet there is the hope that in a few months’ time, the city will be a showcase for the transport of the future.

It is, of course, all part of a modernisation project promoted by a Bolivian government determined to drag the country into the 21st-century. After years of lagging behind its Latin American neighbours, it’s unsurprising to hear the pride and ambition in Prieto’s statement that this teleférico is an “incomparable project… we hope that it will become the most popular in Latin America”. And part of this modernising impulse comes from outside: there are only three companies worldwide with the technical expertise to build a cable car system of this scale, and it was Austrian firm Doppelmayr who won the contract for the project. Yet it becomes clear from speaking to túatú how important it is for the image of the project that it be seen as a Bolivian initiative. The $234.6 million government investment in the project is being financed by a loan from the Banco Central de Bolivia, the operators and technicians will be Bolivian (after being selected and trained by Doppelmayr), and the maintenance will ultimately be transferred to these local experts. The Austrians may be doing the building, but the message is clear: this project is Bolivian.

This isn’t just a nice way of encouraging potential passengers or creating some catchy slogans for a presidential re-election campaign: it also adds a certain legitimacy to the acquisition of land that was needed for the project. Whilst some of it (such as the former train station) already belonged to the government, other areas had to be acquired from private ownership, with what Prieto describes as “fair compensation” for those who have had to be moved. Somehow it seems easier to swallow the taking of land for a project that can claim to be “by Bolivians, for Bolivians” than for anything that might have the taint of foreign investment on it.

Ultimately, whilst it is clear that the arrival of the teleférico will change La Paz, no-one knows to what extent, or how. Not the neighbours above whose houses the cars will pass continuously every twelve seconds for seventeen hours a day, not the minibus drivers who hope to convert their service into a shuttle between these key points of arrival and departure, not the accountants who will have to balance the books to ensure that ticket prices are competitive and yet also cover the system’s operating costs (a surprising aim, since Dale’s assessment is that “virtually no public transport system is self-sustaining”). At the opening of this year’s carnival, the iconic clown-like figure of the ch’uta bounded out of a teleférico cabin to embrace the outgoing cholita queen: the perfect marketing image for this city’s blend of tradition and modernity. Yet it still remains to be seen whether the teleférico itself will be able to win a place in the hearts and routines of ordinary paceños and alteños.