Buenos Aires – Just outside the city limits of Buenos Aires, in the defunct railway station dubbed Remedios de Escalada, a dedicated group of train enthusiasts are busy refurbishing an important part of Argentina’s history.
They call themselves the Ferroclub Argentino and, in association with the Museo Nacional Ferroviario, they are working to preserve various documents, artefacts, locomotives and wagons from Argentina’s railroading past for the enjoyment and education of the public.
Even if you’ve never heard of them, in fact, you may have seen some of their trains in the movies ‘Evita’ and ‘Seven Years in Tibet’.
Ricardo Campbell, president of Ferroclub, said that the club received around US$50,000 for a week’s worth of filming for ‘Evita’ and more than 10,000 for a few days during the train station scene in Seven Years.
He said the phone company Telefonica made a commercial there and, from time to time, documentary filmmakers shoot on-site.
Though they enjoy a tax-free status, Campbell explained, including an electricity subsidy from the state, the club’s maintenance costs are high and donations are necessary.
Evita’s director, Alan Parker, provided a fence (looting during economic doldrums has been a problem) for the extensive club premises, and the Argentine Navy ‘sold’ them a 100-year-old steam engine, in 1987, for one peso.
Campbell estimated that approximately 200 people come out each weekend to peruse the various attractions housed within what was, in the early 1900s, a series of workshops used for shipping and building materials for the then burgeoning Argentine railroad.
Visitors are welcome to climb aboard vintage, wooden passenger cars like the 1925 British Midland Ry carriage or the luxurious Argentine Ferrocarril Sud, made on site in 1925.
In addition, the club boasts an impressive array of early steam and diesel locomotives from Europe and the US, a mini-train for kids and an antique wooden dining car that serves up casual refreshments.
History
Argentina’s first train line opened in September 1857 with a 13km-long railway line, from a Buenos Aires station in what is now Teatro Colon, to Flores.
Sixty years later, the Argentine railroad had developed into one of the largest in Latin America, linking the rich farmland of the interior with port destinations on either side of the Andes.
Indeed, the proliferation of Argentine railroads coincided with its fabled economic boom years, known as the Belle Epoque.
Another little known fact, said Campbell, is that Argentina began deploying diesel engines in the 1930s, a full 20 years ahead of European countries.
Financed, engineered and built in large part by British investors and workers, the early 20th century railroad became a stepping-stone for other lucrative investments in areas such as land, public utilities, banks and shipping.
Anglo-Saxon culture, from English tailoring to brick houses to football and cricket, was brought, with the steady trickle of immigrants seeking their fortunes, along for the ride.
Living the dream
Luis Alberto Diaz, a chemist whose specialty at the club is woodworking, related a story about how, when he was a child, he told his father he wanted to be an engineer for the railroad.
“My father warned ‘you’ll wind up hungry’,” Diaz said. But he never lost his passion for trains and was ecstatic when, seven years ago, he wandered into the Ferroclub.
After that, he said, “I never stopped coming.”
Gustavo Choren, a wine journalist who was helping to restore a wooden coach from 1909, said: “There aren’t many (train clubs) in the country with the amount of material (trains) that Ferroclub has.
“For this reason,” he continued, “Ferroclub is the most recommendable to tourists, following my criteria.”
“We are living the dream,” said Campbell, referring to the 150 or so men working there as volunteers, most of whom are not train experts.
“I sometimes remind them (the volunteers) we created all of this from nothing,” he explained, gesturing toward the rows of locomotives below his office window in various stages of repair.
The Future
On 26th April 2006, then-president Néstor Kirchner announced plans for a high-speed electric train, the first of its kind in South America, among the three largest Argentine cities: Buenos Aires, Rosario and Córdoba.
However, there has been much controversy surrounding the project from the moment it was announced, and it was notably missing from the recently announced 2009 budget.
Whilst it was lauded as being a ‘new historic step in Argentine transport’ by some government officials, many are sceptical. Uncertain of the need for – or feasibility of – such a plan, Campbell remarked that ‘it will always run in the red’.
Choren, expressing a common scepticism here about major transportation projects, added: “We know our politicians and doubt their promises.”
Nevertheless, last year a 2km-long light railway opened in Buenos Aires’ posh Puerto Madero neighbourhood, and rumours persist of the possibility for a high-speed line between the capital and the coastal town of Mar del Plata.
But at the Ferroclub, according to Campbell, they ‘don’t deal with politics or religion; only history’.
The Past
The 1857, inaugural run of Argentina’s railroad was a tentative success – approaching speeds of 24km/hr, one of the train’s two coaches derailed as its owners looked on from the relative safety of horseback.
After all, the fledgling nation was still busy establishing an integrated, federal government, let alone its definitive borders along the Andes and in the northern provinces.
Constructing what would become the largest railroad in Latin America, and thereby transforming the sluggish, rural economy of Argentina into, at its heyday, one of the world’s top five was the nascent dream of an enterprising few.
Penn State University’s Luis Alberto Romero writes that in 1880, there were around 2,500km of Argentine tracks laid down, delivering a freight output of less than a billion tonne-kilometres.
By 1916, the track mileage had rocketed to an impressive 34,000 km, with a freight output of nine billion tonne-km – close to seven times that of Brazil’s railroad system, and nearly three times more than Mexico’s.
According to Romero, that drastic turn about was due, in part, to ‘deliberate and systematic’ actions taken by the Argentine state.
These included fomenting a close association with foreign investors – mostly British – the promotion of a new, liberal policy towards immigration and the opening up of arable lands after the ‘Conquest of the Desert’.
And until Argentina’s railroad corporations were finally nationalised by president Juan Domingo Péron in 1948, Englishmen were intimately involved in realising that dream, owning nearly three-quarters of all Argentine railroad mileage and financing the majority of the rest.
Historian William R. Summerhill, of the University of California, Los Angeles, writes that as early as the 1880s, Argentina became the go-to destination of British capital in Latin America, overtaking Brazil.
Over 75 years until 1910, writes Leland H. Jenks, in an article in the ‘Journal of Economic History’, the UK had invested two billion pounds in Argentina alone.
Some historians have even argued that Britain had set up an ‘informal empire’ in Argentina.
Summerhill, however, finds the notion ambiguous at best on the grounds that profits from Argentina’s railroads were modest, while the majority of those benefiting from related land holdings were Argentine.
Whatever the cause for the annual 5%, real GDP per capita growth rate between 1875 and 1914, what seems clear is that Britain’s stamp on the railroad here was indelible.
British Influence
The very first steam engine to operate on Argentine soil was built by the Hunslet Engine Company of Leeds, for use in the Crimean War.
After hostilities had ended, train parts were sold on the international market, where the engine was purchased by the Western Railway Company of Argentina, whose director was British national Daniel Gowland Phillips.
Whole train stations ending up in Argentina were built across the Atlantic in Britain. La Plata’s old central station, the one in dressed up in ‘Seven Years in Tibet’ to represent the Graz Station in Austria, is an example.
Following construction and subsequent news of unrest in India, the destination for which it was intended, the exotic looking station was sent to calmer shores.
The two largest Argentine railroads, the Buenos Aires Great Southern Railway Co. Ltd. and the Central Argentine Railway Ltd., were built, owned and operated by elite British landowners and merchants from their headquarters in London.
Among this group was the first general manger of Great Southern, a Mr. Edward Banfield, for whom the Banfield Station was named after opening in 1873.
Entire towns in Argentina, incorporated after the introduction of the railroad, were named after symbolic plants of what was then the UK.
La Rosas (the roses, England) Los Cardos (the thistles, Scotland) and El Trebol (the clover, Ireland) were consecutive stations on the Great Southern line in Santa Fe province.
Widely criticised for its enormous deficits – over US$220m/yr for 35,000km of track – the public railway lines were reduced to approximately 8,500km of track.
Through the 90s, however, deficits continued to rise, costing the state about US$400m/yr to maintain – amounting to a state subsidy of nearly 50% of the cost of each ticket.
Poor service, deteriorating trains and inordinately high passenger accidents have spurred riots by angry customers throughout Buenos Aires over the past few years.
This was seen most recently just last month when angry commuters, fed up with delays and cancellations on the suburban rail system, set fire to carriages in protest at the poor service.
Current president, Cristina Fernández de Kircher, has put aside more than $6bn pesos for the improvement of transport during 2009, but it remains to be seen if the improvements will be felt by commuters – or if Argentina’s glorious train days are over.
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