Escobar’s steam engines found in Columbian theme park!

Posted by Chris Graham on 20th July 2023

A reader updates us on a couple of interesting steam engines with connections to one of Colombia’s most notorious drug barons.

Escobar’s steam engines: This very nicely maintained and painted Baldwin locomotive is now on display at a Colombian theme park.

Juan Camilo Lozano, from Tuluá, in the Valle del Cauca, Colombia, has sent us some photographs of a 3ft gauge 0-4-0 railway locomotive and a steam roller which he’s seen in his country, both of which were owned by the late ‘drug lord’, Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria. They are located in the Hacienda Nápoles theme park in Puerto Triunfo, in Antioquia, Colombia.

The locomotive’s works plate indicating that its year of build was 1905.

The locomotive is a US-built Baldwin, No. 27133 dating from 1905, which worked for the Ferrocarril Antioquia, in the ownership of which it was Fleet No. 13.

Close to the locomotive is this US-built steam roller, that was most likely manufactured by Kelly-Springfield, in Ohio. The horizontal, cylindrical, apparatus above the boiler barrel is a steam chamber, its function being similar to that of a dome.

The steam roller is another American machine, and has the looks of a Kelly-Springfield product, built in Springfield, Ohio. But without access to its works plate, it’s impossible to tell it apart from an almost identical Buffalo roller, since the design was so very similar.