The Havana–Güines railway (1834-1842), the first railway built in the Spanish world

A forty-five-mile line from Havana to the sugar town of Güines, ordered by the crown in 1834, paid for with a two-million-peso loan raised in London by a colonial development board, opened in sections from 1837 and sold to a private company in 1842. The board's own printed accounts carry both columns: the school, the chemistry chair and the railway on one side; the hunting of runaway slaves, and 3,744 day-wages of its own enslaved men left out of the road's cost, on the other.