Railways and Exports in Latin America

A direct implication of our results is that, during the period under consideration, some countries might have been trapped in a non-development equilibrium, in which railways were not built because of insufficient government revenues, but these did not grow enough due to insufficient transport infrastructure and its negative effects on foreign trade.

That is from this paper by Vincent Bignon, Rui Esteves, & Alfonso Herranz-Loncan. 
I would not discard an explanation base on "extractive" institutions like the Sierra Leone example in Why Nations Fail.