Ghosts of Industry: Valladolid, Mexico

 

                                   Painting of the train station in Valladolid.

I love riding trains and hanging out in train stations. I ran into another lover of trains and train stations a couple of days ago at a party in Valladolid, Mexico, where I'm shooting a documentary about the resilience of the Maya people of the Yucatan. He's Tom Earnest Jones, an 88-year-old American who relocated down here three decades ago after he retired from his job as a psychologist in Ashville, N.C.

Tom loves train stations so much that he bought his current home based primarily on its proximity to the abandoned station in central Valladolid. He's just two blocks away. He wrote a small book about the station in Spanish and English in 2015.

                          Tom Jones, not the singer.

This morning, I met Tom at his house and, because he broke a hip a couple of years ago and can't get around easily, his daughter Becky drove us down to the station so we could look around. The station opened in 1906 with train service to Merida, the Yucatan state capitol. It closed down in the late 20th century.

Tom advocates for the station to be renovated and put to new use--perhaps as a museum. Right now, the Mexican government is constructing the massive Tren Maya project--a luxury passenger line for tourists that will start in Cancun and loop around the peninsula's interior. The Valladolid station is being built about four miles north of town. Tom hopes the authorities will build a rails-to-trails walking and biking path from the new terminal to the old one.

Here are some shots of the old station:

Tom's a fascinating guy. He grew up in Detroit, son of a bigwig in the Republican Party. When he was 12 years old,  in 1947, he traveled by train to Washington, D.C. to become a US Senate page. He stuck with that until he graduated from high school, and, shortly afterwards, began exploring the world--taking the first of many trips to Mexico. Tom is determined to become fluent in Spanish. He's not there yet but he's still working at it.

Here's a photo he has leaning against the wall of his bedroom in Valladolid: