A Brazilian Curiosity, 2013

The Hotel Duas Marias, a somewhat pretentious country house hotel in Sao Paulo state is about midway between Jaguariuna and Cosmopolis. Its website is at www.hotel2marias.com.br/ (Link broken by December 2023. RD) and it's on Google Maps.

In May 2015 I was sent some pictures of the Deutz diesel described below, it has been given a makeover and plinthed properly:

I'd known about the place because it is home to a metre gauge Beyer Peacock 4-6-0 from the Mogiana Railway but knew nothing else about it. We spent a night at the hotel after a long road journey from Sao Joao del Rei. Actually it turned out to be rather a disappointment as a hotel and the BP loco was also in poor condition and lacked a tender. The real joy of the place, and a complete surprise, was finding three wooden-bodied metre gauge coaches, all very dusty but in their original condition with all their fittings etc and basically looking excellent thanks to being kept under cover. Judging by their axlebox covers, balcony footplates etc there are one each from the Sao Paulo Railway, the Paulista and the Sorocabana. The SPR one would have to come from the Braganca Paulista line since this was its only metre gauge section, its main line being Irish gauge. One's a dining/bar car and one is a sleeping car. There's a pseudo-wooden coach parked in the middle of them which the hotel uses as a kitchen which you can see in one of these photos. Apparently the other coaches are sometimes used for people to sit in at mealtimes though they weren't being used for this while we were there - though this could well be because we were almost the only visitors that night. None of my Brazilian friends knew anything about them or even knew of their existence.

The building in which they and the loco are housed is interesting as well. It looks very much like an old station though so far as I have been able to find out there was never a railway there, the only lines in the district being the Mogiana from Campinas north through Jaguariuna (today the ABPF's principal preserved railway), the new Irish gauge railway running north-south a little to its west which replaced it and the EF Funilense, originally 60cm gauge and later metre gauge, which ran north from Campinas through Cosmopolis and later became part of the Sorocabana (and which was the home of the two 600mm gauge Sharp Stewart locos preserved at Cosmopolis.)

The Deutz just sits in an abandoned state on the hotel lawn, by chance immediately outside our room, otherwise I might well have missed it.

(Thomas Kautzor adds - "The Deutz is 8890/1929, a PMZ122 F of 790mm gauge supplied to Paranagua Harbor, Paranagua-Rio, J. Bettega & Cia., Curitiba. It is the only loco of that gauge supplied to Brazil by Deutz. A total of 82 PMZ122 were built between 1926 and 1931, many for export, and only one was known to survive: Nr. 8438/1928, 600mm, Preuss. Wasserbaumat., Emden/Ostfriesland / 19xx Hartsteinwerk de Boer GmbH, Emden / 06.1989 Eisenbahnfreunde Lengerich Nr. 25. It's in the "Feldbahnmuseum Lengerich" : http://www.eisenbahnfreunde-lengerich.de/  So it's a rare beast, thanks also to Philipp Kurasch for additional information.)