History of the Saigon - My Tho railway

The first and only railway in Vietnam that could cross the river without a bridge. 

On November 12th 1880, the French Colonial Council licensed the construction and operation of the first railway in Vietnam to the private contractor Joret. In early 1881, the contractor Joret embarked on the construction of a railway from Saigon to the Mekong Delta of Vietnam. 

The railway from Saigon to My Tho had been built with a length of more than 70 km. The estimated cost of the project was more than 12 million francs with materials brought from France. By the middle of the year, all plans were completed and the construction site was put into operation. The organization of the construction of the railway was quite large and urgent, with more than 11,000 employees of both France and Vietnam - the French side was mainly engineer officers and engineers, while the manual workers were Vietnamese.

The Saigon - My Tho railway was the first railway of Indochina. This was also the second railway built by the French abroad, after the first railway about 13 km long at Pondichéry, India - built in 1879. It helped change the thinking of Vietnamese in Mekong Delta at that time when traveling only by horses and boats.

According to many historians, if the railway didn't stop at My Tho but also extended further to Can Tho and through Mekong Delta to Phnom Penh as originally planned, then the traffic would be in the early development of Mekong Delta, not prolonged retardation. Thanks to this railway, the position of My Tho became more prominent than other cities in the Mekong Delta, including Can Tho.

Due to the characteristics of local region, which is mostly rivers, most of the roads that the railway passed through were lowland and muddy. The need to reinforce the roadbed took more time. The railway also passed through large fields and some residential areas. One problem the railway had to deal with was that there were two rivers separating it. The French contractor ordered Eiffel to build two bridges, including the Ben Luc iron bridge (crossing the Vam Co Dong river) and the Tan An bridge (crossing the Vam Co Tay river).

Four years later, when the railway was put into operation, the bridges were still incomplete. Therefore, to bring the train across the big river, the carriages were temporarily separated to put on the ferry across the river, then connected again and then continued to run. The type of ferry used by steam engine carrying more than 10 carriages. The ferry was fitted with rails and devices to connect the ground track to the ferry's rails. The train had to cross the ferry until 1886, after the two iron bridges (550m and 133m long) were completed, so the train could go without having to move the carriages on the ferry again.

On July 20, 1885, the first train departed from Saigon to My Tho city. It had a total of 15 stations. From Saigon station (the current September 23 Park) went through An Dong, Phu Lam, An Lac, Binh Dien, Binh Chanh, Go Den, Ben Luc, Cau Voi, Tan An, Tan Huong, Tan Hiep, Tra Luong and arrived at the My Tho terminus near the Tien Giang river (near today's statue of Thu Khoa Huan).

At first, trains used steam locomotives, which ran unusually fast or slow. When going uphill across the bridge, sometimes the pot did not have enough steam to run up, so sometimes it slipped down. In 1896, trains were invested with new locomotives 220-T-SACM with stronger traction capacity. It took about 2 hours and 30 minutes to go through the whole route. The later has been shortened to less than 2 hours. The average speed was about 37 km/h, much higher than the Vietnamese transport at that time.

The Saigon - My Tho railway operated until the 50s of the 20th century. By this period, the car and bus industry began to thrive. The road system of Saigon - My Tho has also been invested more and better, so people had gradually turned to road for more convenience. These things had greatly affected the train service, there were days when the whole train had only a few dozen people, leading to losses. In 1958, this railway was stopped by the authority of Ngo Dinh Diem, ending 73 years of existence.

125 years later, the oldest railway of Indochina was researched and rebuilt by the Vietnamese Government. It is expected that this new Saigon - My Tho railway will have a length of 87 km, passing through Binh Duong, Ho Chi Minh City, Long An and Tien Giang. The project has a total investment of more than 7,000 billion VND as it will follow the new planning for the whole Mekong Delta. 

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