"The effect of a rail road communication with Panama, would, therefore in my opinion,
be to unite the two oceans by ship canal. With the rail road, the world would see the
amount of commerce, seeking portage here.  The railroad would soon be found
insufficient to transport it and a ship canal would be the result.  Thus I regard the proposed
rail road, some what in the light of a demonstration which the world requires first to be made,
in order to give practical proof as to the necessity and benefits of a ship canal."

M.F. Maury  - May 1849

"I wondered how any person could live many months in Aspinwall, and wondered still more why any one tried."

U.S. Grant  -  1852

"In Suez we had to build everything, here you already have a railroad like this."

Ferdinand De Lesseps - Dec. 1879

"The Panama Railroad is very largely a creature of the canal and
the construction of the latter in the absence of the Railroad would be practically impossible."

John F. Stevens  - 1905

"A collision has its good points as well as its bad ones -- it indicates there is something moving on the railroad."

John F. Stevens  - 1905

"Meanwhile the Panama railroad had been built by Americans over a half century
ago, with appalling loss of life, so that it is said, of course with exaggeration, that
every sleeper laid represented the death of a man."

             Theodore Roosevelt - Nov. 1906

"Well people let me tell you about a rumblin' railroad train.
It crosses the Isthmus of Panama in the dry spell and the rain.
You can hear it comin' from miles away,
You can smell the diesel smoke.
And it means a heckuva lot to us Canal Zone folk.

Hear it comin' down the track
See that smoke blowin' back,
We would not be the same
Without the Panama Railroad train. "

Submitted by John Lincoln

Author unknown
(A camp counselor at CZ Union Church Camp in Santa Clara in 1962)