The literature on the economic history of railways in Latin America has usually been confined to national boundaries. As so often happens in Latin American historiography, most works have focused on the largest and richest economies, and some excellent books have been published over the last few decades on the history of railways in Argentina, Mexico, Brazil and Cuba. This volume edited by Sandra Kuntz is exceptional in that context, since it adopts a regional approach and brings together eight national studies with a similar structure, with the explicit objective of offering a general picture of railway expansion in the region.

As is pointed out in the introduction, the most direct precedent of this book is the volume edited by Jesús Sanz in 1998 with the title Historia de los ferrocarriles de Iberoamérica (1837–1995). The Historia mínima de la expansión ferroviaria en América Latina represents a clear step forward over that previous book, benefitting from the accumulation of high-quality research during the last twenty years. The new book (unlike Jesús Sanz's edited volume) is not exhaustive, but covers just seven country cases and a study of the Caribbean, in which a detailed analysis of Cuban railways is completed with information about the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Jamaica and a few references to the Lesser Antilles. However, the chosen countries have historically accounted for at least 95 per cent of the railway mileage of the whole region and, thus, the book provides a rather complete picture of the main features of Latin American railway expansion. On the other hand, the lack of exhaustiveness and the absence of an extensive dataset (like that included in Jesús Sanz's book) is actually consistent with the fact that this volume belongs to the series of ‘minimum histories’ published by El Colegio de México. It is therefore designed to provide an accessible introduction to the topic, which also explains the absence of footnotes and references within the text, although all chapters include an up-to-date bibliography.

However, these features do not affect the rigour of the different studies that make up the volume, in which some of the best-known national specialists have offered a generally high-quality up-to-date state of the art. The national studies are preceded by an introduction where Sandra Kuntz gives a summary of the main conclusions of the national chapters and an excellent global approach to the features, benefits and challenges of Latin American railway systems in the long run. In this regard, this volume is an essential reference for all those interested in the history of railways in the region.

The book focuses on the period of railway expansion, which lasted until the first decades of the twentieth century. The importance of railway expansion for the economies of Latin America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries cannot be exaggerated. Due to the absence of cheap transport alternatives in most countries of the region, railways were often indispensable for the take-off of exports, integration into the world economy, economic growth and state development. The successive chapters show how railways performed a quite different role across the countries of the region. Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Cuba and Chile stand out as successful cases, where the construction of large railway systems was one of the main drivers of export growth and economic expansion, although in Chile excess construction ended up negatively affecting net operating revenues. Uruguay also built a relatively dense network, but railway impact was reduced there by the availability of water transport and the specialisation of the country in livestock production. In Peru and Colombia, finally, railways might be characterised as relative failures, largely due to slow construction and the small size of their railway networks. This diversity of experiences is well reflected in the national chapters, which have tried to cover in all cases the following topics: the situation of transport before the railways, the process of railway expansion (including investment, construction costs and government policies), the characteristics of each railway system (layout, operation, traffic, etc.), and the impact of railways on the economy. Beyond this common structure, some chapters pay more attention to certain specific aspects, such as rates and transport costs in Mexico, the social savings in Peru, backward effects in Brazil, regional effects in Argentina and private and social returns in Uruguay, largely reflecting the latest advances in each national historiography. However, beyond those particular approaches, one of the main virtues of the book is the common approach and topics covered across the different studies, from railway construction to operation, business structure, returns, government policies and the effects on the economy.

Although the main focus of the book is on the period of railway expansion, all chapters provide an epilogue that summarises the evolution of railway systems from the end of their expansion until the present. In contrast with the diversity that characterised national railway histories until the interwar period, those epilogues tell a rather similar story of decadence. In most countries, the end of export-led growth and the diffusion of the motor car brought about traffic reduction and the worsening of returns, and these were usually accompanied, first, by the nationalisation of the systems and, later on, by a new privatisation in the last years of the twentieth century (with the exception of Cuba). Neither of those two changes brought significant relief to Latin American railway systems, which have been characterised in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries by the closure of lines and the gradual reduction of their economic role. The book perfectly shows the stark contrast between the centrality of railways in the region during the First Globalisation and their current marginal existence. This approach to the whole life cycle of Latin American railways is another reason why this book is essential reading for all those interested in the past and present of rail transport in the region, and a very interesting reference for world railway historians in general.