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Why Cuba’s Only Electric Rail Line is Falling Apart/What happened to Cuba's only electric rail line?

Cuba's only electric line, known historically as the Hershey Electric Railway (and later the Camilo Cienfuegos division), is currently in a state of severe, near-total collapse, with only short, fragmented branches operational. Once celebrated as the world's last surviving classic American "interurban" transit system, it fell victim to a combination of natural disasters, the closure of its founding industry, aging equipment, economic decline, and Cuba's crumbling and damaged infrastructure, effectively silencing the historic 57-mile mainline connecting Havana to Matanzas. Today, the surviving route suffers from highly sporadic or canceled service, with many parts of the overhead line left in disrepair, and now faces severe infrastructure challenges.

While it is no longer fully functional as a continuous line, efforts and studies to revive it are occasionally evaluated. The history and downfall of this historic rail line is attributed to several key events, involving a long, fascinating decline.

Origins

Built in the 1910s by the Hershey chocolate company, the line originally linked Havana to the company's sugar mills and the town of Matanzas. Following the Cuban Revolution, the line was nationalized and absorbed into the national railway system (Ferrocarriles de Cuba) and the Hershey town was renamed to Camilo Cienfuegos. The original 1920s US-built cars were eventually replaced with secondhand electric cars from Barcelona, Spain in the 1990s.

Hurricane Irma dealt a major blow to the railway in 2017, severely damaging the overhead electrical infrastructure and halting most services.

While rehabilitation efforts have been sporadically proposed, equipment shortages and widespread issues with the broader electrical grid have made it impossible to fully restore the full Havana-to-Matanzas route.

The Death of the Sugar Industry

The railway was built in 1916 by American chocolate tycoon Milton S. Hershey to transport sugarcane and workers between his vast plantations, the model company town of Hershey, and the port of Havana. Following the Cuban Revolution, the line was nationalized. When the Cuban government permanently closed the central Hershey sugar refinery (later renamed Camilo Cienfuegos) in 2002 due to a global decline in sugar markets, the railway lost its primary commercial purpose, economic anchor and financial engine, completely ending the heavy freight operations that funded the rail infrastructure, and the railway transitioned into a highly subsidized commuter-only line.

The Catastrophic Hit from Hurricane Irma (2017)

The defining blow came in September 2017 when Hurricane Irma battered Cuba's northern coast. The storm caused extensive damage to the railway's electrical infrastructure and tracks, knocking down miles of overhead catenary (system) wires and wooden utility poles. Because of severe nationwide economic constraints and a lack of copper and materials, the Cuban government never fully repaired the high-voltage overhead lines, causing an indefinite suspension of the main line. Cuba's severe, rolling blackouts also made running an electric-dependent rail network nearly impossible. Outages regularly leave cars stranded without power.

Antique Equipment and Spare Parts Shortages

For decades, the railway ran on original 1920s U.S.-built Brill railcars. In the late 1990s, these were replaced by second-hand, 1940s-era electric train sets donated from Barcelona, Spain. Due to the long-standing U.S. embargo and severe domestic shortages, sourcing electronic components and maintaining these decades-old Spanish trains became virtually impossible.

Current Status

The full 90-kilometer mainline passenger route from the Casablanca station (across the bay from Old Havana) to Matanzas is entirely out of service. Electric operations are largely non-existent on the main route. Only very short, isolated segments, such as the short branch connecting the town of Hershey to Jaruco, have occasionally seen sporadic, limited, unreliable electric shuttle services used by locals. Where trains do run, they are sometimes towed by diesel locomotives because the electrical grid is non-functional, due to island-wide power grid failures, and lack of working equipment. The iconic American-built Brill railcars from the 1920s were retired in the 1990s. They were replaced by second-hand, 1940s-era "Sarriá" cars from Barcelona, Spain, which are now largely broken down due to a lack of spare parts. The specialized railway workshops and the historic American-style town of Hershey have fallen into deep physical ruin, leaving the remaining train cars parked as rusting museum pieces.

The line remains a major point of cultural interest for international tourism. A reactivation study for the electrified network published in 2024 suggested that establishing a regular, two-hour connection along parts of the route for tourism and eco-travel could be economically viable if vehicle technology and power supplies are restored. However, significant capital investment is required to rebuild the overhead wires and repair the railcars, and Cuba's systemic electrical grid blackouts and intense economic crises mean that a true electric revival remains highly unlikely for the foreseeable future.

Why did Valve stop updating the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions of Team Fortress 2?

Valve stopped updating the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of Team Fortress 2 primarily due to strict corporate restrictions, financial fees imposed by console manufacturers, and hardware/resource limitations that clashed with Valve's vision for free, rapid game updates.

Paywalls and Patching Fees (Xbox 360)

Valve originally intended to provide substantial content patches to the Xbox 360 version, including the iconic Gold Rush update. However, Microsoft’s strict policies at the time forced Valve to stop for several major reasons.

During the Xbox 360 era, Microsoft required developers to pay a steep fee, reportedly $40,000 per patch, to push game updates past a certain limit. Valve wanted to deliver all content updates to players for free, mirroring their PC model. Microsoft’s marketplace rules mandated that significant content drops must be listed as paid downloadable content (DLC). Refusing to force players to pay, Valve chose to halt the updates entirely.

Outsourced Development & Complex Architecture (PlayStation 3)

The PlayStation 3 version faced an entirely different set of hurdles rooted in hardware and corporate resources.

Valve did not have an internal team of PlayStation developers at the time. The PS3 version of The Orange Box was completely outsourced to Electronic Arts (EA). The PS3's notorious Cell Broadband Engine architecture was highly complex and notoriously difficult to optimize. Because EA handled the initial port and had no contractual or financial incentive to continuously adapt massive PC updates to the console, the PS3 version was effectively abandoned right after its 2007 launch.

Limitations of Console Hardware

As Team Fortress 2 evolved on PC, it transformed into a massive, resource-heavy game driven by cosmetics, weapons, and complex item ecosystems. The hardware limitations of the 7th-generation consoles made porting these updates impossible.

The Xbox 360 and PS3 only featured 512 MB of total RAM. Valve quickly realized that the hundreds of custom cosmetic models (hats), unique weapon attributes, and complex inventory systems would completely crash the limited console memory and tank performance.

Because of these hurdles, both console versions remained frozen in time as a snapshot of the game’s original 2007 launch state. While Electronic Arts finally shut down the PlayStation 3 servers in March 2023, the Xbox 360 version survived for over 15 years in its purely vanilla form.