Yeah, I remember the train. Or trains. The "litorina" was a one-car special, upholstered seats and snacks; it took 8-9 hours to get from Corumbá to Campo Grande. There was a picture of sunflowers on the partition at the end of the car; from this I learned sunflowers were "girasols" in Portuguese---or are they? It's been a long time. The regular train was like 12 hours, you bought your food from vendors at each stop. It would pull into the big city, Campo Grande, just at sunset.
For local color these big emus would emerge from the mato and run alongside the train, "winning" the race by running faster than the train itself before disappearing back into the bush.
Three stops along the way were inside one ranch; the ranch allegedly owned by folks named Rockefeller. You could tell the train's arrival was the day's biggest event at these places, too, there being no roads in and out of Corumbá.
I remember being told in training, at Cuiabá, that that part of the Noreste had been put in during the Fifties at some cost to human life. Workers came to one part of the roadway, they started breaking out in green lumps with a new disease, called [of course] [on the spot] the "bossa verde." Maybe 40% of those infected died. No cure was ever found. Construction continued.
They got past that piece of roadway. No more "bossa verde."
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