Railway · Panama

How much did Panama Canal Railway cost to build?

The Panama Canal Railway (Panama Railroad) is the 47-mile (76.6 km) railway across the Isthmus of Panama from Colon on the Atlantic to Balboa on the Pacific, begun in 1850 by American capitalists led by William H. Aspinwall and opened from sea to sea on 28 January 1855. Ira E. Bennett's History of the Panama Canal says it cost USD 8,000,000 to build 'this railroad of less than fifty miles', and the University of Houston's Engines of Our Ingenuity episode 1208 gives the same eight million dollars, in mid-nineteenth-century dollars.