Layout: two networks, one mill
Central Romana's standard-gauge (1,435 mm) railway is built around two distinct networks that meet at several junction points. The North/West network runs through Higüeral and Guayamate to El Seibo; the East network extends south of Higüey. To reach the eastern network at all, trains cross two large viaducts — over the Río Mucarabón and the Río Chavón.
As of a 2014 survey, the combined system totaled 354 km of track: 140 km of main line and 214 km of branch lines and field loading spurs. Each network typically runs two to four trains a day, departing the mill shortly after the two daily shift changes, at roughly 07:00 and 17:00.
How a harvest moves
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A gantry crane swings a load of cane onto a wagon behind No. 23, while an ox team waits to bring up the next load.
The mill draws essentially 100% of its cane supply by rail. Cutting is still done largely by hand in the fields, with cane hauled short distances to trackside loading points by ox cart or tractor-trailer. There, gantry cranes lift the cut cane onto rail wagons for the trip to the mill — a transshipment method reportedly developed at La Romana early in the 20th century and later adopted across Cuba's own sugar railways.
Central Romana's own figures describe a railway moving up to roughly 22,000 tons of freshly cut cane per day at peak capacity, and about 4,000,000 tons over a typical 225-day harvest season, using around 900 cane wagons.
The railway also carries traffic beyond cane: at least one daily oil tanker train runs from the port to a large depot for farm vehicles at Batey Higüeral, and a short branch just east of La Romana supplies fuel oil to the Casa de Campo luxury resort, which is also owned by Central Romana.
Maintenance and crews
Track maintenance is organized from depots spread across the network — Guaymate and Batey Lechugas on the northern/western side, and Batey Cacata and "EC 405" on the eastern side — staffed by track gangs using motor speeders and dedicated maintenance machinery like the unit pictured. The railway also serves its own ballast quarry on the western line near La Romana.
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A track maintenance machine at work, marked "CR" for Central Romana.
Modern dispatch: from paper orders to GPS
For most of its history the railway ran on paper train orders, like most North American industrial and shortline railroads of the same vintage. In the 2010s, Central Romana partnered with the rail-technology firm Railcomm (since acquired by the UK's Tracsis plc) to digitize that process.
The system installed is a Track Warrant Control (TWC) computer-aided dispatch platform, integrated with GPS radio tracking of each train. This matters because Central Romana's railway is "dark territory" — it has no mainline signals or trackside electronics to independently verify where a train is; all location information comes from the radio-based GPS system reporting into the dispatch software. The new system gives dispatchers a real-time graphical view of train positions across the network and lets them issue digital movement authorities in place of the old paper-based train orders, aimed at reducing human error and improving safety on a railway where two separate networks, ox-drawn crossings, and mixed cane and oil traffic all share track.