Railways in

Anguilla

The Sombrero Island lighthouse and Superintendent’s house, circa 1880.

Anguilla is an island in the Caribbean and a British Overseas Territory.

There are no railways on Anguilla itself but there were once tramways on the small rocky island known as Sombrero Island, some 54km from the main island.

In the late 1860s, a lighthouse was built on Sombrero Island. A few years later, a company started mining guano, then an important phosphate mineral, on the island. Tramways were constructed to convey the guano to the seashore. Wagons were probably propelled by hand. There was no harbour or beach, so guano was simply piled on the rocky foreshore from where it was conveyed by lighter to waiting ships.

Mining operations ceased in the late 1880s with the exhaustion of the guano deposits, and the workings were abandoned. The sole remaining inhabitants of the island were the lighthouse keepers, who remained until 2002 when the light – a modern concrete structure which had replaced the original in 1962 – was automated.