The Opportunities of a Railroad: Reminiscing Tarlac and the Manila-Dagupan Railway
- Nicholas Lee Paredes
- 4 days ago
- 11 min read
The 19th century Transport Situation in the Philippines
During the Spanish Colonial Era, land transport was largely undeveloped before the construction of the railroad. Railroads had not existed in Spain itself until 1848 and up to this point, the horse-drawn carromata and the boat were the favored transportation modes for longer distances in the Philippines — if one could afford them.
Well developed inter-regional linkages between Philippine provinces were simply not encouraged in general by the Spanish. Mines and plantations, which would have helped kickstart the construction of a mode of mass transport earlier, only appeared in the mid-18th Century in the Philippines. The tenure of a Philippine Governor-General was also very short. With an average term-length of 2.8 years, a get-rich-quickly mentality was often adopted by colonial leaders which meant that long-term development and vision building was impossible. Other factors like Friar-friction from the potential land-rights needed for a railroad, an overburdened labor pool which an outdated and corrupt colonial government were, amongst other reasons, why major infrastructure was few and far between.
The important infrastructure that did exist, like main roads, were often not maintained at a “national” level until absolutely necessary and even then it wasn't to a high standard. Bridges that were broken or destroyed were also not repaired with any haste, if repaired at all. Officials found more interest in selling interim ferry services to the highest bidder.
Land travel was slow and oftentimes dependent on the graces of the weather and seasons. Journeys that stretched from one province to another were the type of travelling that was described as an ordeal rather than a trip. Spanish missionaries who had to travel these land routes to get to their assigned parishes described road travel as “terrible”, “dangerous”, “long and rough”, “most infernal”, and “wretched”.
Water travel (usually a steamship) was used as a faster mode of transportation if you wanted to get anywhere far and relatively quickly.
Here's another way to illustrate how difficult inter-provincial was: in Manila, stone was the preferred material used in construction because it was more costly to import timber from other provinces. It was also more expensive to transport goods from Cagayan Valley to Manila than it was to transport goods from Manila to Europe. The 50 tons per hectare of sugar from Bulacan could be sold at a price 50 to 280% higher than 85 tons of sugar per hectare from Pampanga or Nueva Ecija due to Bulacan’s accessibility with Manila by water, someting that Pampanga and Nueva Ecija did not have.
German ethnologist Fedor Jagor (who was in the Philippines from 1859-1861) observed that “the essence of Spanish policy… to effect the isolation of separate provinces and to prevent… a sense of national interest.” Connecting the provinces properly would undermine their authority and a fear of losing local influence was a major concern for the Spanish colonists. Add this to the self-sufficient orientation of pueblos and you have a local transport network that, while underdeveloped, did not necessarily even want to change or improve.
The Manila Railway Company’s start.
While the Spanish were far less enthusiastic about the potential of railroads than their colonial counterparts such as the Anglo-Americans; the need for a railroad became clearer in the late 1800s, when the transition from subsistence agriculture to commercial agriculture and manufacturing started taking shape. Anglo-American influence and capital in the Philippines had steadily grown and would eventually overtake Spanish colonial anachronisms and inefficiency enough to encourage the construction of a railroad.
In August of 1875, a Spanish royal decree finally published the general guidelines and standards required for the construction of a railway in the Philippines. Six months later, in February 1876, a study credited to Eduardo Lopez Navarro detailed plans concerning 3 possible main lines in Luzon. 1) Manila - Laoag, 2) Quingua (modern day Plaridel), Bulacan - Tuguegarao, Cagayan, and 3) Manila - Albay. Branches lines from San Fernando, Pampanga - Iba, Zambales and Calamba, Laguna - Taal, Batangas would also be built.
It took more than a decade before construction would begin. The London-based Manila Railway Company (MRC) won the bid to actualize the designs of the railway. They had Engineer Don Carlos Bertodano represent the company in the Philippines and the first cornerstone of what would become the Manila-Dagupan Railway, a.k.a. the Main North Line was laid in Tutuban, Tondo on July 31, 1887. It would serve 4 of the 5 Luzon central plain provinces, namely: Bulacan, Pampanga, Tarlac, and Pangasinan. Nueva Ecija would eventually be serviced by a train line built towards Cabanatuan later on.
The MRC was given four years to finish the railroad, with initial costs for construction estimated to be up to about 4,600,000 Pesos then increased to 5,000,000 Pesos The eventual cost, however, was about 63% more expensive than anticipated - with the construction bill going up to about 7,900,000 Pesos.
Issues with railroad construction began to appear soon enough for the builders. Many parts of the Spanish guidelines did not match up to the reality of the situation, but were still followed in order to comply with the Royal Charter. Slowdowns due to natural hazards or a lack of detailed surveying were common. MRC General Manager Horace Higgins observed that having to follow Spanish blueprints for construction also led to many unnecessary costs. Stations and sheds built in unneeded locations and improper surveys leading to track that would be forced to end abruptly due to poor terrain were amongst the examples pointed out when he was interviewed.
Supposedly, the biggest problem of the railroad builders was actually the Spanish Government. Bureaucratic inefficiency was often blamed as the reason why the end-cost so greatly overshot the initial estimates. Pettiness & corruption, such as the “requirement” of bribes often motivated officials to move faster. It came to a point that government intervention in both Madrid and the Philippines had to be exerted to counter delays.
Michael Gonzalez in his paper on the Manila-Dagupan Railway describes learning about dealing with Spanish bureaucratic inefficiency this way:
“Very little delight and enthusiasm can be gleaned by the reader today from the correspondence between the railroad builders and the government officials they had to work with.”
The creation of the railroad, overall, however, was a massive novelty and potential convenience. It was met with enthusiasm by to-be passengers of the northern main line.
What and where did the Manila-Dagupan line carry and generate revenue from on its train lines?
We do have some numbers of what the Manila-Dagupan Railroad carried during the Spanish colonial era and we know the MRC serviced both commuter and freight lines during its time.
By 1892, passenger traffic had gone beyond the half-million mark headcount. The railway was an incredibly useful way to transport people. When the railway opened to the public, it drastically increased the practical range of movement per day that Filipinos could do and proved to be a very popular travel mode.
Before the railroad, travel time from Dagupan to Manila would have been ponderous and sluggish. Even if you paid for a carromata to carry you, one still had to trek up the same crude roads you took on foot and hope the weather was patient enough for long enough. Travel was measured in days when travelling on land. The faster mode of transport was on water. A steamer took 27 hours to get from Manila to Dagupan.
The Manila-Dagupan rail cut that down to 8 hours. It, theoretically at least, allowed workers from the Pangasinan to travel to Manila to sell their goods and return home within the day.
Industries also enjoyed the benefits of fast and unimpeded movement. The rice and sugar industries, seeing the benefit of no longer shipping by water, diverted many of their important industries away from rivers and closer to railroad stations. Workers like the Rice huskers in Pangasinan and Manila sugar packers could now work closer to the railroad stations. Over time, the machines and industry would also move closer to the railroads. River towns slowly lost their monopoly (but not their importance) to freight and foot-traffic as rail activity continued chugging along.
To put it in perspective: of the 31,292 tons of freight in total that was shipped via rail in 1892, approximately 7,913 tons (About 25% of the total tonnage moved) of this was sugar. A large number, but this only accounted for 16% of the total sugar production. A majority of sugar was still being shipped to and from Manila using the older methods such as through the carromatas and waterways.
The Manila-Dagupan Rail also did not quite reach the initial freight expectations, with a prediction of 70,000 tons, the railway did not even meet half that. Competition for tonnage was expected, however, and 31 thousand tons of freight is not insignificant, especially for a new transport mode barely a year into its service.
A report from 1892 talks about the revenues generated by the stations of the MRC. Manila, San Fernando, and Tarlac City constituted the majority of the profits. The report also says that the majority of train receipts were from passenger service lines, with 95% of these passenger rail customers having purchased 3rd class tickets. For freight travel, rice (41%), sugar (24%), and construction materials (6%) constituted the majority (71%) of all freight tonnage.
The Manila to Tarlac route in particular dominated both freight and commuter services, 33% of passenger trains, and 49% of freight trains served in the Manila-Tarlac line
Effects of the Railroad on Tarlac and the rest of Central Luzon.
I’d like to first note that pre-1892 data (that is apparently reliable enough) comes from the Spanish 1887 census with the next census being conducted in 1903 by the Americans. This period was also marked by both the Philippine revolution and the Philippine-American war, so some stagnation in the numbers and inconsistency in population count can be expected.
The railroad had many positive effects in the areas that surrounded the lines. Increased real estate values can be seen in places like Tutuban, where the land value would increase from Php 0.24/sqm to Php 15.20/sqm by the time the Americans took over. Employment opportunities and increased labor mobility also came with the construction and operation of a railroad (by 1902, an average of 900 Filipino workers were in the MRC at any given time). There was also an increase in the consumption of imported goods, as well as the increase of production and crop-flow from the provinces to Manila and her ports as claimed by MRC General Manager Higgins.
The place most affected by the Manila-Dapugan line, however, was Tarlac City and the towns surrounding the provincial capital. This is seen in the 1887-1903 population changes in many railroad towns in Tarlac, but particularly in Tarlac City. No other railroad city would see the 52.3% population growth that Tarlac province saw. In places like Capas and Moncada in Tarlac - tiny station towns surrounding Tarlac City- the population growth goes as high as 123.1% and 436.2%, respectively, from 1887-1903.
Other towns, however, whether or not they were connected directly to the railroad, would experience stagnation or even large population drops. Paombong, Bulacan was not connected to the railroad, but barely experienced changes in population size - remaining at just under 9,000 from 1887 to 1903. Marilao, Bulacan and Hondagua, Quezon, meanwhile, are examples of towns unaffected by the railroad despite being connected to the line. Malolos, Bulacan, despite being connected to the railway, lost 19.9% of its population in the same timeframe as Tarlac’s growth. Bulacan province as a whole decreased in population by 6.7% (16,137). Some Spanish-colonial provincial centers also lost provincial capital status; Nueva Ecija’s capital of San Isidro moving to Cabanatuan is an example of this.
So the railroad, in a vacuum, is not going to simply induce population or economic growth. People and goods , after all, have to come from somewhere.
Tarlac’s development, like any other piece of history or data, is better understood when taken into the context of its place in the greater scheme of things. As a young, new, and undeveloped province, Tarlac had the weakest links to Manila.
There are a few things that make the railroad’s Tarlac numbers interesting: (1) Tarlac was a young province, created in 1873 from sections of Pampanga and Pangasinan for administrative purposes. (2) Tarlac served as a geographic crossroads for the provinces surrounding it, but was considered to be the least developed amongst the provinces of the central Luzon plain. Spanish officials labelled Tarlac as a “3rd-class” province, based on revenue classification. (3) Tarlac was a landlocked province and unlike its neighbouring provinces, did not have a water-based transportation system. The creation of a direct route to a young and underdeveloped province like Tarlac was bound to have a positive explosive effect on it and is a likely reason for the railroad affecting it so heavily.
It also “helped” that the Manila-Dagpuan Line bypassed many productive towns in provinces like Bulacan and Pampanga, thus encouraging the flow of goods to Tarlac stations. It is not a surprise to see how these older and more established provinces, with their own networks, were affected less (for better or worse) by the creation of the MRC. Pangasinan, Pampanga, and Bulacan all had sea access in addition to the admittedly crude road systems already in place.
Tarlac’s growth, one can argue, was a direct result of the emergence of a transportation backbone that all the surrounding provinces already had (admittedly in a different mode). A direct route to Manila - one that could move not only Tarlaqueño goods and people to and from Manila at unprecedented speeds and cost had a massively positive effect on Tarlac.
The North-South Commuter Railway (NSCR) following in the footsteps of its ancestors
By 1917, the Philippine government would incorporate and nationalize the railways companies into the Manila Railroad Company (MRC). Reorganized as the Philippine National Railways (PNR) on the 20th of June 1964 with Republic Act (RA) 4156, the PNR absorbed the responsibilities of the MRC and remains as the main railway company of the Philippines.
The PNR continued to run freight and commuter lines after their restoration post-WW2. The advent of the automobile and an emphasis on road-infrastructure, however, had negatively affected the capabilities and quality of the PNR, which began to slowly deteriorate due to a chronic lack of maintenance and support.
The last railroad freight services halted in 2003, with the closure of International Container Terminal Services Inc.’s freight line to Laguna. Commuter lines would continue to run in Metro Manila until 2024, ceasing service in preparation for the North-South Commuter Railway (NSCR). The PNR remains operational in a limited capacity on the Main South Line, serving the Bicol Region.
The construction of the NSCR is currently ongoing on the Main North Line from Manila to Capas, Tarlac. It aims to alleviate the poor connectivity that the Greater Manila Area experiences and should be fully completed by 2032, with a partial opening of the line to Malolos (NSCR North 1) by 2027 and ending in Clark (NSCR North 2) by 2028.
NSCR North’s terminus is in New Clark City, Tarlac, not 8 kilometers away from the train station that serviced the fast-growing small town of Capas. It's a lovely, if not deliberate, homage and modern take on the historical Manila-Dagupan Line.
It’s a good sign that we get to see a rail line being constructed with (what seems to be) some institutional foresight and historical perceptiveness. At the very least, the NSCR has historical precedence and doesn’t come off as a band-aid solution to our overburdened transport system. New Clark City is being built with the idea of creating a new growth center north of Manila, a node that Filipinos can rely on to function as an effective center of government, education, business, and technology. Ensuring its greater connectivity to the capital means that it can stimulate growth and development outside of Manila while bringing the citizens of the greater region closer to each other.
Special thanks to: National Historical Commission of the Philippines' Resource Center, Library and their team.
References:
Corpuz, Arturo G. The Colonial Iron Horse: Railroads and Regional Development in the Philippines 1875-1935. University of the Philippines Press. 1999
Corpuz, Arturo. Effects of the Opening of the Manila-Dagupan Railroad Line On Central Luzon, 1892-1939. Journal of Eastern Asia Society for Transportation Studies, Vol. 1., No. 1, Autumn, 1995
Mercado, Lucinda C. The Manila-Dagupan Railroad Line. National Historical Commission. 1973
P. Jose Algue S.J. Atlas de Filipinas. Government Printing Office, Washington D.C. 1900
Lopez del Castillo-Noche, Manuel Maximo. Puentes de España en las Filipinas: The Spanish Colonial Bridges of the Philippines. University of Santo Tomas Publishing House. 2011
Gonzales, Michael Manuel. The De Manila A Dagupan. Asian Studies 17. 1979
Dela Cruz, Raymond Carl. “PNR to Begin Construction Q1 2022”. Philippine News Agency. 22 January 2022. https://www.pna.gov.ph/articles/1166097. Retrieved January 28 2026
Crus, RG. “PNR eyes 5-year shutdown for North-South Railway construction”. ABS-CBN News. 16 Feb 2023. https://news.abs-cbn.com/business/02/16/23/pnr-eyes-5-year-shutdown-for-north-south-railway-construction. Retrieved January 28 2026
Hilotin, Jay. “Philippines: $15.4-billion North-South Commuter Railway to beat Manila’s traffic nightmare?”. September 08 2025. https://gulfnews.com/world/asia/philippines/philippines-154-billion-north-south-commuter-railway-to-beat-manilas-traffic-nightmare-1.500243417. Retrieved Feb 02 2026
National Library Digital Archives Cartographic Collection. Retrieved Feb 06 2026. https://nlpdl.nlp.gov.ph/CG02/home.htm
