Trains: When the Road Wins, the Countryside Loses

A country with such a large territory like Argentina has always needed a reliable transport mode to connect its regions and different provinces. Today, motor transport has almost entirely taken over from the railways and most Argentines prefer the bus to the train for long distance journeys across the country. In 2008, bus services in Argentina welcomed around 65 billion passengers when only two billion used the train. The decline of what was the world’s tenth largest railway network after the Second World War has left many scars in the country’s demography. Indeed, it has dried out many economies which were geographically far from Buenos Aires – what were once prosperous towns have now become ghost villages.

The railway has been an important factor in Argentina’s development. The train allowed the most remote regions of the country to be reached, and allowing passengers and merchandise to get to Buenos Aires’ port, the main connection with the rest of the world. Pino Solanas, the Argentine director behind ‘La Próxima Estación‘, a documentary on Argentina’s declining railway network, strongly supports the return of the Argentine train. He claims that the railway costs “seven to eight times less than motor transport” as a locomotive can carry as much as 50 lorries’ load and an average sized train can carry as many passengers as 19 buses. Moreover, one of the best advantages of the train is that it can be run in any weather conditions. So why did such a great form of transport suffer such a significant collapse in Argentina?

Bad Management

In the late 19th century, the success of the first train lines, which ran between Buenos Aires and the west, attracted vital foreign capital, mainly from the UK and France. These investments allowed a major expansion of the railway between 1870 and 1914, and Argentina was soon on the way to the 47,000km of track it had by the end of the Second World War.

This situation remained so until 1940, when Juan Domingo Perón decided to nationalise the network to renew the one hundred years old tracks. Perón asked US general Thomas Larkin to undertake a study on transport in Argentina, with the results known as ‘Plan Larkin’. The nationalisation proved popular among some influential people at the time. Argentine writer, Raul Scalabrini Ortiz strongly defended the move saying, “The most powerful instrument of the English hegemony on us is the railway. The railway weapon is the fare. It can wipe out industries, create privilege zones, organise regions, stimulate particular cultures but also destroy growing cities.”

The plan essentially consisted of eliminating 32% of existing tracks, sacking 70,000 workers and renewing the locomotives and carriages by buying new material from abroad. By the 1970s the network was only 30,000km long.

At the end of the 1980s the situation of Ferrocariles Argentinos was at its worse. Only half of the locomotives were in use while the rest of them were left abandoned. The wave of privatisation instigated by President Carlos Menem at the start of the 1990s did not spare the train, and the quest for profit influenced the closure of a number of unprofitable lines in remote provinces. This was a fatal move for many of the towns wherethe railway was the actual raison d’être and had boosted the economy in such parts of the country.

In 1993, Ferrocariles Argentinos cancelled all the long distance passenger services, which were handed over to the provinces. Only the nationwide freight service remained privately owned: the network in Buenos Aires region was split between four private companies.

Today, the network consists of 7,000km of track, and only 17,000 workers remain.

“In our country, ‘Plan Larkin’ cancelled train lines to save money, but its real target was to weaken regional economies and the national industry. What have we saved? Nothing!” says Pino Solanas.

“By choosing motor transport, the state is paying one of the most expensive transport systems in the world. It equals to 27% of the country’s GDP when other big countries like Canada and Australia only spend 9% of theirs on this mode.”

Lorry Workers Union Domination

Jorge Felipe Ruffa is a 61-year-old train enthusiast working for Ferroclub, an association to preserve the memory of the Argentine train. He believes the decline of the train to be due to Argentina’s geography, saying “The reason to this is the political proximity with the US.”

The large number of motor companies in the US pushed Argentina to use the road more than the rail as a transport mode. Moreover, the motor industry is really powerful in Argentina. As an example, the leading union in the country is the lorry driver’s union. For a transport company it is also cheaper to work on the road – the company only has to buy the lorry; the road is maintained by the state. A rail company, on the other hand, has to take care of both the trains and the tracks.

“When I was younger, we used to travel from Buenos Aires to Mendoza in 16 hours on the train. Today, for the same distance, a train would take 25 hours because the tracks are not maintained correctly. It is obvious that the bus is winning the competition, even though it is more dangerous,” says Jorge.

“North America has many more motor companies than railway ones. It was then much easier to trade with them if Argentina was using the road as a transport mode,” he continues.

A study of responde.org a specialist group who went through national statistics in 2007 found that 40% of villages in the countryside are threatened with extinction. The study counted about 800 villages with less than 2,000 inhabitants. An article in newspaper Clarín claims that the suspension of the train had pushed people to migrate to big cities to work or study, and preventing them from coming back to their home town.

“The village extinction favoured the exodus to big cities which are not prepared to receive these people, and they end up living a really precarious life,” says Marcela Benitez, founder of Responde.

The Case of Mechita

Mechita is a small town situated at about 200km away from Buenos Aires. The town was first built in 1906 when Manuel Quintana, a Buenos Aires entrepreneur, gave two parcels of his land to build a railway warehouse. Historically, close to 95% of the active population directly lived from the railway industry. Until the 1990s the majority of the town’s income was coming from the railway industry which was the only work available.

Often referred to as the “railway colony”, the village had around 5,000 inhabitants in 1950. However, the railway crisis strongly hit the life of the village.

“During the railway era, you could find people on the street at anytime in Mechita. The warehouses were operated 24 hours a day,” remembers Ismael Sánchez a former train carpenter. “When we had to leave, because of the privatisation, we tried to keep an activity through recycling carriages and many of us had to leave for the a big city.”

The population went down to 2,400 inhabitants in 1980 and just,850 in the last census in 2001. Sixty percent of the population is over 65, many of them are unemployed while those with jobs dedicate their activity to the services sector. Nowadays, only one train a day stops in Mechita passenger station, 60 years ago there were about 20.

Many of those villages are trying to find a new way to get their place back into the country’s social economic space. Responde set up a plan to use the past of the village as a tourism advantage, build a museum and organise visits of the warehouses.

Since Menem’s privatisations, 800 train stations have been shut. Therefore, the case of Mechita is not an isolated one. In the last two presidential mandates, a few projects have been proposed regarding the train, though most are poorly targeted. For example, instead of refurbishing existing tracks, the government pays large subsides to private companies.

Néstor Kirchner’s government also bought a large number of second-hand locomotives and carriages from Europe when only 86 out of 298 local vehicles are used. The cost was estimated at $1,5bn. A couple of years later, his wife and current president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, proposed the installation of a high speed train, the ‘Tren Bala‘, to unite Buenos Aires, Rosario and Córdoba, Argentina’s the three biggest cities.

Pino Solanas claims that with half of the budget planned for the Tren Bala project, the government could buy 11,000 km of tracks for cargo trains, 7,000 km for the five biggest services to the provinces, more than 300 locomotives and hundreds of new carriages to bring back the average speed to 120km/h.

Government Policies Today

On 15th January, Pablo Schiavi, Argentina minister of transport, inaugurated a double decker train at Retiro station. “The railway service grew up in a bestial way,” he commented. “Trains are becoming more reliable and therefore people use them more.” Unfortunately, those trains are only set to run in Buenos Aires Province and yet, nothing is done to renew passenger inter city trains.

Regarding the cargo network, things seems to be moving since the minister of transport recently travelled to the Santiago del Estero province, in the north of the country. Schiavi joined local governor Gerardo Zamora to sign an agreement to renew the Belgrano Cargas services (currently working at only 30% of their capacity) in the province. The $650m investment is meant to reactivate a transport pole in the province that would benefit to the whole north of the country. “This will clear the roads and also reduce transport costs,” says local producer Pablo Karnatz. “The railway is really important for our region. Lorries should only be a link to the railway and not replace it.”

Works on the Belgrano Cargas were meant to be part of the 2004 Plan Nacional de Inversiones Ferroviarias. The $300bn investment plan implemented by Nestor Kirchner aimed at renewing the whole railway network by 2007. When today, long distance trains cannot run faster than a 40m/h speed, many worry about the speed of the works on Belgrano Cargas lines.