
World's Toughest Train Rides: Cuba - On Rusty Rails
Cuba's railway dates to 1837, when the island became the world's largest sugar producer and needed a way to move the cane. This episode rides that legacy network from end to end, starting on the Hershey line, Cuba's only electrified railway, built in the 1920s by an American chocolate company, running from Havana to Santa Clara. Decades of the U.S. embargo show up in every rusted joint and improvised repair. In Santa Clara the train passes through the site of Che Guevara's 1958 victory, and in Trinidad passengers ride a former sugar-hauling line while drinking rum cocktails. At a maintenance depot in Moron, mechanics explain how they keep pre-Revolution locomotives running with no reliable source of spare parts. The episode ends aboard a working 1920s steam locomotive cutting through sugarcane fields, the same route the sugar trade once depended on. It is a portrait of infrastructure held together by necessity and skill, not nostalgia.