Trains…or perhaps the lack of them

The section in the Overseas Timetable under Colombia reads:
“Rail services in Colombia are generally suspended at present, as the State Railway is now bankrupt and has closed. A new ‘Shadow’ organisation STF has resumed rail service, under contract, on some lines.”
Not the specific information I was hoping to glean.
I bought Overseas Timetable ‘Your travelling companion since 1873′ in Stanfords travel book shop in Covent Garden, where I spent a solid couple of hours squinting at all the maps they had of South America to try to find the ones with the best train lines. It turns out that all maps have a very very faint grey line on them, where the railway lines might be. Even the shop assistant who bounded over to me enthusiastically to ask if I needed any help admitted defeat and ran off to deal with an easier task after half an hour of squinting.

I left the shop with maps, post-it notes, Overseas Timetable and a raging headache wondering if I had set myself an impossible task.
But then I told myself, Paul took this trip in the seventies, surely this should be easier with all the technology at my fingertips in 2010.
After some googling of Colombian railways I started to wonder if perhaps modern technology was working against me. It seems people were less interested in keeping up-to-date printed modern timetables/information as posting spurious unreliable information on the internet.
There was only one thing left to do, investigate for myself…