Founding: a mill without a mill (1911–1917)
The Central Romana estate was founded in 1911 by the South Puerto Rico Sugar Company, an American firm already operating the large Central Guánica mill across the Mona Passage in Puerto Rico. For its first several years, La Romana had no mill of its own: cane cut on the Dominican estate was barged overnight across the strait to be processed at Guánica. The railway was laid out from the very beginning, in 1911, to gather that cane from the surrounding fields.
A mill was finally built on site at La Romana in 1917, constructed by the Honolulu Steel Works — a builder more associated with Hawaiian sugar plantations, reflecting how international the sugar-milling supply chain already was by the 1910s.
Central Romana tells its own version of this story, with more on the agricultural and community side of the business, on its official history page.
Steam era (1910s–1960s) (1910s–1960s)
By 1923 the railway extended some 60 miles, worked by eleven steam locomotives: two 65-ton and six 40-ton 2-8-0 "Consolidation" types built by Baldwin Locomotive Works, plus one 40-ton and two 25-ton locomotives from H.K. Porter. Rolling stock included 250 thirty-ton and 193 twenty-ton cane cars, ballast cars, water tank cars, and box cars — already a substantial industrial operation.
Steam power lingered on the property longer than on most comparable railways: a 35-ton steam locomotive was reportedly still on the roster as late as 1962, even as diesel-electric power had been arriving since 1948. See Locomotives for the individual steam engines known to have worked at Central Romana.
No. 11, an H.K. Porter 2-6-2ST built in 1920, survives as a static monument near the mill — the last steam engine of the fleet still visible today.
Steam era (1910s–1960s) (1910s–1960s)
How Central Romana compares to other Dominican cane railways
Central Romana is not the only sugar railway in the Dominican Republic, but it has outlasted most of its peers. As of the mid-2010s, only three Dominican mills still used rail to bring in cane: Central Romana itself, Ingenio Cristóbal Colón (a narrow, 762 mm-gauge network near San Pedro de Macorís), and Central Ingenio Barahona. A separate state-owned network, the old Ferrocarriles Unidos Dominicanos passenger and freight system in the north of the country, was progressively closed between 1951 and 1976 and no longer operates at all. Central Romana's railway is both the largest of the surviving sugar networks and the only one built to full standard gauge (1,435 mm) rather than a narrower industrial gauge.