Boca del Monte

For more than a century, anyone riding the train from Veracruz to the capital knew the mountains were behind them when it stopped here. Boca del Monte station, put up in 1872 and finished in 1873, stood at kilometre 172.6 from the port and 40.6 km from Orizaba, exactly where the Cumbres de Maltrata give way to the Puebla plains. From Maltrata, 20 km down the line, trains climbed 724 metres on grades of 3.6%, through the La Bota valley and the twin ravines, with tunnels, cuttings and bridges such as the Wimmer, a curve of about 84 m over five spans on masonry piers 22 m high. The name refers to the spot being the way into or out of the Sierra Madre Oriental on this side of the state.

On 1 January 1873, with the Mexico City–Veracruz line just completed, two trains left Buenavista station and pulled in here at noon and at two in the afternoon. A Mr Porraz had opened a restaurant serving lunch for one peso; President Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada stepped off for the inaugural banquet, welcomed by Veracruz governor Francisco Landero y Cos, with guests including Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, Ignacio Ramírez and Antonio García Cubas. The scenery of this stretch also appears in Casimiro Castro's lithographs for the Álbum del Ferrocarril Mexicano. The station was built on a marshy valley, the bed of the Maltrata river, which flooded often and had to be levelled.

Today it is a hamlet of the municipality of Esperanza with 414 people in 2020, 205 women and 209 men, at about 2,430 metres. Houses spread along the track and southwards, so the station now sits on the northern edge, cut off by low hills and by the Tecoac stream, which runs beside the Puebla–Orizaba road. The railway complex has four buildings: the station itself, the section house, the base of the water tank and the oil store, with ashlar walls, brick partitions, Catalan brick vaults resting on rails and sheet roofs on timber trusses. It has been out of use since 2001; doors and windows have been carried off and some walls have collapsed, and residents and the town council are seeking a loan of the property to give it a cultural use. Several houses in the village use rails from the same line in their gabled roofs.