Bob Haldeman Interview (1)

From an interview with Bob Haldeman, the new junior engineer at the Braden Mines (1941)

Swent : 

How did you get up to the mine? 

Haldeman: I took the train to Santiago, and I met the manager, Charlie 
Palmer, and said hello to him. He got me on the train to 
Rancagua. 

Swent: What kind of train was it?

Haldeman: A regular train. In Rancagua I had to wait a while and catch 
the rail car. It was a narrow gauge railroad built in 1915 or 
1920. It was seventy kilometers from Rancagua up to the mine in 
Sewell. If the railroad had one, it had a thousand curves in 
it, and the train had one of these old side-drive logging steam 
engines. They bought them from Washington and Oregon, took them 
down to Chile, and put little cars on them. It was like a 
Toonerville trolley, with seven or eight cars. They'd slowly go 
uphill. 



The train took four and a half hours, and the rail car was 

nothing but a truck chassis with a Ford motor in the front, and 

then they put steel wheels on it that they made in the foundry 

there. Then they put a canopy cover on the thing with isinglass 

windows that you took off in the summer and put on in the 

winter. It had five rows of seats of four each and a driver. 

That took two hours. 

So I got up to Sewell late in the afternoon. 

Swent: How high is Sewell? 

Haldeman: Seven thousand feet. I walked from the railroad terminal to the

mine staff house, which was near the mine portal track grade at Sewell: 

Index to Haldeman Interview