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Hawaii, its stunning beauty has entranced people since the time of the early Polynesians.
Today the island of Maui continues to capture the imagination of all who come to view its
scenic grandeur.
Towering high above the ocean from whence they came, the west Maui mountains make all
that surround them almost insignificant.
Even though these magnificent peaks seem foreboding, this beautiful manifestation
of God's handiwork is served as a beacon, and today on the slopes of the west Maui's
we find the valley carpeted with sugar cane, a link to the island's agricultural past.
Next to the cane fields we see the modern Hawaii, with world class golf courses and
resorts by the sea.
Bridging the old with the new is a Maui institution that is equally at home in both areas, the
sugar cane trade.
Although, a train is the last thing that many people expect to find in Hawaii, the Lahaina,
Kaanapali and Pacific Railroad has been running along Maui's west side since the late 1960s.
The railroad's primary purpose is to transport vacationers between the resorts at Kaanapali
in the town of Lahaina, yet there is much more to the train than that.
The LKMP, commonly referred to as the sugar cane train, is a link to the past, to a time
when railroads were a part of everyday Hawaiian life.
Climb aboard as we take a ride on the only railroad running in regular service in the
state of Hawaii, the sugar cane trade.
Mornings are a busy time at the Poukoli'i Road Roundhouse, where one can find the shop
crew hard at work as the trains are prepared for the day's runs.
Although the engines are all dialed up, they are indeed real steam locomotives that need
a care and inspection before the trains roll.
The northernmost stop on the line is the boarding platform at Poukoli'i.
A popular stop for tour buses, it becomes momentarily busy as people pile aboard.
Hi, good morning folks, and welcome aboard the sugar cane train behind the Kaanapali
and Pacific Railroad, before my Japanese friends, Ohayougozaimasu.
Nice sunny day out in Kaanapali.
My name's Pete, and I'm your train conductor today.
I'll be narrating your tour, pointing out various things of interest along the way.
The golf course you're seeing up on the left here is the North Course of the Royal Kaanapali
Golf Club.
It's a championship golf course, 18 holes, par 72.
And we do occasionally have some pretty big PGA golf tournaments out on this golf course.
Most recently, the senior PGA golf tournament just happened a few weeks ago, GTE Senior
Classic, and we had all the best senior golfers in the world.
We're getting out here on the North Course, Arnold Palmer and Dean Firmino are all new
golfing greats.
So, three adults and one child, run three please.
The second station on the way to Lahaina is the stop at the beautiful resort area of Kaanapali.
Here the locomotive stops for water as a jitney brings patrons from the beach hotels.
The Kaanapali Beach Resort complex was begun in 1960 with the construction of the Sheridan
Maui.
It didn't take long for Kaanapali to become one of the premier tourist destinations in
the United States as people began flocking to Maui to frolic on the beach and go for
a swim in the ocean.
Five miles south of the Kaanapali Resorts is the old whaling town of Lahaina, which
is a popular destination for the guests from the resorts.
Although a four lane highway connects the two areas, the Sugar Cane train provides a
decidedly different way to get there.
The railroad does what it was designed to do, it carries passengers and entertains people.
It's a different way of getting to town and it's a different sort of countryside to go
through.
You're not driving on the highway.
You can see how it was a hundred years ago passing through the Sugar Cane fields when
it was the only way to get back and forth to work for many of the people that worked
out here.
And it's a little piece of history that's still running in this rather modern resort
area of Kaanapali.
Let's hit this road.
Hi folks, good morning, welcome aboard, thank you.
Hello there.
Okay, mahalo, hello.
Departing Kaanapali, the train begins to angle away from the highway as it gives the passengers one more look at the resorts.
On the ocean side of the train, a little bit towards the rear of the train now, is the Royal Lahaina Hotel out there.
And high rise.
And down across the lower bound course, a little green and white hotel, is the Sheraton Maui.
Now, this is where the Kaanapali Resort area began down at the north end here.
And these were the very first two hotels to be built out here in Kaanapali.
They both opened in 1963.
That's the Kaanapali Resort area down below.
The word Kaanapali in Hawaiian means the rolling cliffs.
The rolling cliffs.
The island that you see out in the background behind the Kaanapali, that is the island of Lena'i.
Which they call the Pineapple Isle.
Every island has a little nickname that tells you about the character of the island.
Of course, Maui is called the Valley Isle.
The down course you're seeing right out here, this is the south course of the Royal Kaanapali Golf Club.
Also 18 holes.
R-72, this course was designed by Jack Snyder.
Directly below the train, the high-end Regency Hotel, those 310 high rises.
To the right, that pink hotel, the Maui Marriott.
Well, we're having a beautiful sunny day today, so I feel like singing a song about nice sunshine we're getting here.
It's time to let yourself unwind.
Well, we're gonna have a good time.
There's gonna be, there's gonna be sunny days where you can be.
Sunny.
Funny.
Days.
Sunny.
Funny.
Days.
Funny.
Days.
I say, get up.
Go outside.
Take yourself on a train ride.
Close the morning sunlight.
Brighten all your sorrows.
Forget yesterday.
Just leave all your fears behind.
Let yourself unwind.
We're gonna have a good time.
There's gonna be, there's gonna be sunny days where you can be.
Sunny.
Funny.
Days.
Once the train has crossed Ha Ha Kea Trestle, it leaves the resort community and plunges into the cane fields.
As we come over the Trestle, what we're looking at here is a big sugarcane field.
About seven months' growth on this field.
And at seven months, this field is about a third of the way toward full maturity.
They do let sugarcane grow almost two years before finally harvesting it.
Sugarcane is a tall member of the grass family of plants.
It was first brought to the Hawaiian Islands by the ancient Polynesians who came from the Society Islands of the South Pacific.
They were the ones that brought sugarcane to the Hawaiian Islands.
It does grow year-round here in the islands.
And of course, it has been the main agricultural crop for hundreds of years.
Originally, sugarcane came here to the islands with the Polynesians back around 500 A.D.
Now, the reason for that is the Polynesians or the Hawaiians used sugar for their own purposes,
for kind of making spirits, but basically for something to eat after meals.
Something that was sweet.
Also, they brought their own coconuts in.
That's why we have all the coconuts over here.
Strangely enough, sugar was always part of the Hawaiian culture.
The early Hawaiians who arrived here probably from Tahiti brought sugarcane with them, and it was part of their diet.
So they knew how to grow sugar.
But the industry itself, the producing of raw cane sugar in crystal form, was a development, I believe, in Germany, as I said.
And that was brought here by people like Klaus Spreckels, particularly to Maui.
And the reason it was grown here was because we have the most unique climate in the world for growing sugar.
The yield per acre in Hawaii is around 1,200 tons of sugar per acre.
Now, that is twice the normal yield of sugar per acre any other place in the world.
And the reason for that is that in Hawaii we can make sugar grow for two years rather than one year.
Sugar is naturally a one-year crop, and every place else it grows, like Louisiana, it's one year.
But in Hawaii, because we can control the irrigation, we can actually remove the water from the fields,
just about going to start to ripen, and we will shock that plant into going on for one full year extra.
Although the West Maui Mountains are one of the wettest places on Earth and provide the cane fields ample irrigation water,
there are plenty of sunny days for the riders of the sugar cane train.
Oh, there's gonna be, I say, there's gonna be some sunny days, some funny days for you and me, for you and me, yeah, yeah,
for you and me, for you and me.
Once the train reaches the outskirts of Lahaina, it rejoins the highway and rolls through a pretty residential neighborhood.
One of the most unique aspects of the sugar cane train is its singing conductor, a tradition as old as the railroad.
On most days, one can find Analu at the throttle of the locomotive.
However, from time to time, he brings his ukulele and adds his own personal Maui flavor to the conductor's chair.
He is a Maui boy and nobody thinks he likes a Maui girl. Make no mistake, he doesn't marry a girl from Lahaina, Kohana, or Waikapu. When they're together, he knows just what to do.
He is a Maui boy and a real style. She's a Maui girl and what a smile. He's a calibration cousin of everyone and everyone loves that son of a gun, that Maui boy from the Bali Isle.
I hope to bound tomorrow to marry Kamarama. Nothing to define me in Lahaina and make Kamarama my own.
I'll smile on the island of the valley and live a life of delight. I'm going with Maui to marry Kamarama, unless I get lucky tonight.
Thirty minutes after a left Puokoli'i, the sugarcane train pulls into the old whaling town of Lahaina.
The train leaves the old whaling town of Lahaina.
The old whaling town of Lahaina.
The station at Lahaina is the focal point of the Lahaina-Ka'anapali in Pacific. There is much activity here as the locomotive is turned around and people constantly coming and going.
Your attention please. Passengers for downtown Lahaina. Last bottom boat on the theater.
The red bus now being boarded at the rear station.
In addition to the train ride, the railroad provides service to the major attractions in Lahaina using its popular London double-decker bus. The upstairs seats provide a splendid view of the old whaling town.
Today Lahaina's main business is tourism, with many shops lining the streets. Despite the large number of visitors, Lahaina has retained its old-time charm. Structures such as the Baldwin Missionary Home, the Lahaina House, and the Pioneer Inn, that's where the U.S. flag was raised over Hawaii for the first time, all provide glimpses into the history of this community, which is one of the oldest towns in the entire United States.
Music
The thing about Lahaina is how old it really is. Lahaina was a bustling town before Columbus ever discovered America. So it was an old, ancient Hawaiian village. And when the missionaries and the whalers came here in the early 1820s, they sort of converted the Hawaiian people, the whole atmosphere, into the 19th century, brought the Hawaiian people in contact with the Western outside world.
And all of that happened in this little town because this was the capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom. And the primary industry was whaling until about 1860. Whaling then died out after the Civil War. And sugar took over. Sugar became the primary industry of the Kingdom.
I must remember in those, we still have not been acquired by the United States of America. We're still an independent Hawaiian Kingdom. And the King of Hawaii welcomed the German sugar planters, who brought the techniques of growing sugar and of processing sugar.
One of the early sugar mills that came under German control was Lahaina's Pioneer Mill, which has been a prominent company in the town ever since. This large facility has been here for over 100 years. Even though today's operations are largely mechanized, this was not always the case.
Originally, when they started the plantations, the Kanakas, as they call them, that was the, you know, the lower class of Hawaiians that were working the fields, they would carry the sugar cane on their backs, and they would bring them to like a little cart loaded on the cart, a mule would be hooked up to that cart, and haul it off to the sugar mill.
Through the years, the first train originally was on the island of Kauai at the Leihui plantation. A German fella is the one who invented the train over there. They decided that trains could haul more cars, haul more sugar, and take the place of the backbreaking job that the Kanakas were doing.
Eventually, they had what they call side rails that went up off into the mountain. These were portables. They had little cars on there. They would load those cars. The cars would come down to the main line, load on to the flat cars that the train would haul to the mill. At times, they would have about 15 flat cars on the back of one engine.
The railroad brought most of the cane and also took the workers to work, because the workers, the vast majority of them, upwards of 4,000 at the height of the industry here before the First World War, upwards of 4,000 workers were taken to work every morning on that train, and that train was the key to the success of the plantation.
It's hard to imagine, but on the site of today's Sheridan Hotel, there used to be a railroad terminal. Here we see cars of the old Pioneer Mill Railroad waiting to unload onto a ship at Black Rock Point. This was a scene that was repeated all over Hawaii.
At one time, there were railroad trains on every Hawaiian island. They were mostly centered around the plantations, and they were used to bring the sugar cane in from the fields to the processing mills of the plantations, and so their primary purpose was an industrial-type railroad.
There were common carrier railroads in Hawaii, though, that carried sugar from the mills down to the harbor areas and had passenger service. But on the whole, the majority of railroading in Hawaii was on an industrial scale, and some of the mills were quite sophisticated in their operations with having many steam engines.
Pioneer Mill generally had three or four steam engines in service all the time, from their first beginnings with the railroad in the 1880s until they finally abandoned railroad operations in 1953.
The Hawaiian railroads that most resembled their North American counterparts were located on the Big Island of Hawaii. Here one could find the full-size standard gauge Hawaiian Consolidated Railway. This was the only Hawaiian railroad built to the mainland standard gauge.
One of the more famous Hawaiian mainlines was the Oahu Railway. In its heyday, it encircled a good deal of the island of Oahu, and during World War II, hauled a massive quantity of both freight and passengers. Maui also had a narrow gauge mainline railroad.
Although not as busy as the Oahu, the Kahului Railroad played an important part in the growth of the island. In 1879, construction began on what later became the Kahului Railroad. Running along the north coast of Maui, the lines served the many sugarcane and pineapple plantations of the area.
After World War II, the plantation railroads began switching to large cane hauling trucks. Behind us Pioneer Mill was no exception. Here we see today's sugarcane train running alongside a modern cane road, which is actually built on the old railroad.
By the 1950s, even Hawaii's mainline railroads were in serious trouble, and the 1960s saw railroading in Hawaii come to an end.
Today, only a few traces of the old railroad lines remain, and Kahului, the old railroad station, is an office building. The roundhouse and shop complex are a truck terminal.
Another vestige of the Kahului Railroad that is still around is engine number one, the Klaus Spreckels. This locomotive, along with an old coach, has been restored to working order for a museum display and still runs from time to time. These relics remind us of the Maui railroading past that is now over.
In 1969 and 70, a strange sight befell people visiting Maui, that of a railroad actually under construction. Although railroads had all but vanished in the state of Hawaii, there was a brand new line being built between Kaanapali and Lahaina, today's sugarcane train.
In 1966, Mr. A.W. Mack McKelvey visited Lahaina and fell in love with the beauty of the area. It was he who dreamed of recreating a Hawaiian sugarcane railroad to transport visitors through the countryside.
He teamed up with the Mackay Corporation, a firm with many investments in the hotel and entertainment business, to build his new railroad. Before long, crews were busy laying the track, which incidentally came from the abandoned Kahului Railroad.
On the U.S. mainland in Pennsylvania, new coaches were being built that resemble the Kalakaua coaches of the old Hawaiian railroad. At the same time, two old steam locomotives that had formerly been used by the Carbon Limestone Company in Amherst, Ohio, were being rebuilt to resemble the old Hawaiian plantation locomotives.
The first locomotive completed was engine number one, called the Anaka, in keeping with the practice of Hawaiian plantation locomotives having names. The other locomotive is engine number three, the Myrtle. Despite the differences in the appearance of the two engines, they are both the same mechanically.
The two engines are identical. They, as a matter of fact, have consecutive serial numbers on them, but they're quite different in their appearances. They were modified in the late 1960s, when they were brought to Hawaii for service on the line of Kanepauna Pacific, to resemble Hawaiian locomotives that were no longer here.
And the Anaka is stylized after an engine that would have been typical before the turn of the century. And the Myrtle is a little more modern style after the turn of the century.
Although they're not authentic in that they aren't the original Hawaiian engines, they do look very typical of the engines of the period, and we do maintain them in a rather fancy dress because of the fact they are passenger locomotives.
The Myrtle is patterned after a locomotive on the old Hawaiian railroad, and does in fact look much like the original. The Anaka, while not patterned after any particular locomotive, has features taken from a variety of examples of the old Hawaiian engines.
When Anaka was completed, it made a strange sight leading its train out of the factory in Pennsylvania. A still more bizarre sight was that of the Anaka being test run on the historic East Broad Top Railroad in Pennsylvania.
Seeing the old limestone hauling locomotive all fancied up in Hawaiian garb, running on a railroad famous for hauling coal must have been quite a sight indeed.
Once the Lahaina Kaanapali in Pacific was completed, a grand celebration was held as the Anaka pulled the first train over a hakea trestle.
The owners of the new line had much to be proud of that day and began actively promoting their railroad, once they even staged a very un-Hawaiian event for a local TV news crew.
It wasn't long though before the Sugar Cane train and the Makai Corporation were in serious trouble.
Although history has shown that the train was a good idea, it was simply built at the wrong time.
While tourism on Maui was increasing, there were not enough visitors to support the train and its staff.
In October of 1972, the railroad shut down due to lack of patronage.
In 1973, Willis Kyle, the owner of the San Francisco Steel Fabricating Plant and other railroads, purchased the LK&P from bankruptcy and began the task of rebuilding the railroad.
Although the going was slow, Mr. Kyle and his people have transformed the railroad into the success that it is today.
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