The British
and the Argentine railways
The main sections of the extract are:
-
The Western Railway
Company
- The Buenos Ayres Great Southern Railway & Central Argentine Railway
- The Trans-Andine Railway
- The influence of the railways on the British
- Links to other sites on the history of Argentine railways
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The building of a new Argentina in the second half of
the nineteenth century is invariably connected with the laying of the railway
lines through the country, most of them by British engineering. After the fall
of Rosas in 1852, liberal economic policies were introduced by men who had been
forced to flee the country during the dictatorship and, in exile, had been in
contact with European ideas and customs. At hand in every event was a Briton. Britons placed more long-term investment in South America during the nineteenth century than in any other geographic region. Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Uruguay received the lion's share.' Britain's interest in Spanish America had always been strong. After Lord Ponsonby's intervention in the creation of the state of Uruguay in 1826, his successors, Henry Fox, John Mandeville, William Gore Ouseley, Thomas Hood,. Lord Howden and Henry Southern, all secured advances in Britain's relations with Buenos Aires. Treaties for communications, transport and navigation were signed in the 1850s, paving the way for a mass of investment that began with the railways. |
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Argentina's first railway was not built by a British concern, however; but the
group of shareholders and engineers . included Britons. Daniel Gowland, a
Briton, was vice-president of the Western Railway Company, formed in 1855 with a
capital of £28,000 to build the railway, from the Parque station, where the
Colon Opera House of Buenos Aires stands today, to Flores, running over a
distance of eight miles. The railway opened to the public in August 1857, after
the society had borrowed another £24,000 from the government to complete work.
The company's directors rode on horse alongside the track during the inaugural
run, making a show of escorting the passengers, though in reality not sure of
the safety of their own machine, which travelled at fifteen miles per hour. On
the return to the Parque terminal one of the train's two coaches derailed and,
although a minor accident, it caused considerable delay. The railway managers
asked passengers not to report the mishap to those waiting at Parque, to avoid
undue alarm. The news leaked out the following day; but by then the tales of the
successful journey had caused a greater impression. The train was pulled by an engine later named La Porteńa, built by the Hunslet Engine Company of Leeds.' It had been built for war service in Crimea and had a 5 ft 6 in Russian gauge. When the war ended, the engines and carriages were offered for sale around the world.Daniel Gowland Phillips, the Western Railway Company director, was one of two Gowland brothers, well known in Buenos Aires business circles for their commercial success and power. When Daniel was twelve years old and his brother Thomas nine, their father had taken them to Buenos Aires from England. On arrival, in 1812, their first impression could not have been worse: the body of a man executed for taking part in a conspiracy against the revolutionary government installed in May 1810 had hung in the Plaza Victoria. Daniel and Thomas were among the founders of the Strangers' Club. Daniel Gowland became a director of the Banco Nacional de las Provincias Unidas and throughout his life held many public posts, an achievement which was used in immigration promotion, as proof that Argentina was a land of success for Britons. In his last years, Daniel Gowland was considered something of a patriarch of the British community. At the time of the first run of La Porteńa, the local Press recorded the fact that Gowland was the only Briton in Buenos Aires to have travelled on a train in Europe. His brother, Thomas Gowland, opened an auctioneer's room and later was the founder of the society of auctioneers; he was also among the founders of the Primitiva de Gas Company. He became the first naturalized foreigner to hold a seat on the City Council. Although this was a demonstration of involvement by expatriates in government and administration, it was not an indication of an interest in local politics. He had taken the seat by invitation from all sides of the council, because of his prominence in commerce. |
The first line on which La Porteńa ran was built by a
British engineer, William Bragge, also among the founders of the Primitiva de
Gas Company (Bragge, a collector of old manuscripts and first editions, died in
Birmingham in 1884, after a career that put him among the wealthiest men in the
River Plate). John Allan, an Englishman, was the first engine driver. Although
he was well known and highly regarded for that first in his life, he would
become better known still in 1870 and 1871 as the man in charge of the train
which took the victims of a yellow-fever epidemic from the city's hospitals to
the cemetery on the western outskirts. The original Parque to Floresta line was extended with an 1881 loan of £200,000 from Baring Brothers and eventually linked with a new Western Railway, operated by the Buenos Aires Government at first but later sold to a British group. A company acting for Baring offered £7 million, which was rejected, and a month later the Bank of London and River Plate, in representation of an English consortium, paid £8.2 million at a time when the Buenos Aires province treasury was going through a severe financial crisis.
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The Buenos Ayres Great Southern Railway
& Central Argentine Railway
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Argentina's two biggest railways were the
British-built, owned and operated Central Argentine Railway Ltd and the Buenos
Ayres Great Southern Railway Co. Ltd, with headquarters in London. They were
started at the same time, but the Southern was made in sections, while the
Central was planned as a great iron road to open almost four hundred miles of
sparsely populated, rich land. A decree dated in August 1863 authorized the construction of the Southern, based on a proposal by a group of people that included the already mentioned wealthy Irish merchant Thomas Armstrong and George Drabble, a pioneer in railways and in the frozen meat trade and one-time president of the Bank of London and River Plate who had arrived in Buenos Aires in 1848, Alfred Lumb, Henry Green, John Fair and Henry Harrat, merchants and landowners who were anxious to invest in a promising enterprise and to increase the value of their property by means of the new communications. The initial authorized capital was about £700,000. Lumb had the concession and the support of shareholders among whose names were Thomas Duguid, the Fair family, British Consul Frank Parish - later the Southern's chairman who, with Baring, bought into the Central - and David Robertson. They were all the elite of the British community and as such found no difficulty in selling shares to investors in London, Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester. The company quoted on the London stock exchange. |
 The Standard of 4 August 1865 announced that `The
Southern Railway will be open for passenger traffic on Monday, the trains will
leave in the morning and return at night - they will go to a station within
three leagues of Chascomus', which became the terminal in December of that
year. Those were the first eighty miles. Another 500 were added in the next
twenty years.The Central Argentine was not such an English line in appearance. The concession went to a North American, William Wheelwright, in May 1863. One year later another North American, Allan Campbell, presented the plans for a line running from Rosario to Cordoba over nearly 300 miles. Thomas Armstrong, who had acquired vast landholdings in the territory that the Central was to cross, became one of the railway's principal representatives.  The line
started with an authorized capital of £1.6 million and was completed in 1870.
Extensions to the north followed as well as south to Buenos Aires, by absorption
of smaller companies. The names of the Central's shareholders are repeated in
company after company as if between them they had much of the country to
themselves.
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Another small line, built for the government with a
contract clause which made it immediately saleable to a private group, was the
Andine Railway, running from Villa Maria, in Cordoba, to Mercedes, in San Luis.
In January 1887, Bayless Hanna, the United States consul in Buenos Aires,
reported that the Andine, operating over 324 miles from Villa Mercedes' and a
necessary link in the line from Buenos Aires to Valparaiso, Chile, called the
Transcontinental Railway, had been sold to a British company, which had
outmanoeuvred North American bidders. Two brothers, Mathew and John Clark, had
bought it as a condition for continuing work on the international line. It was just one brief chapter in a forty-year story of the brothers' effort to cut a hole in the Andes. Mathew Clark was sixty-seven when he saw the tunnel go through the Andes, forty years, after he had started work on the idea in 1869. The railway line between both countries was completed in April 1910. |
Tucumán station. End of the line from Buenos Aires today. Originally on the planned route linking Atlantic to the Pacific
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The influence of the railways
on the British
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Everywhere
in Argentina there are reminders of the
British engineering pioneers: a bridge, a track, stamped in Birmingham, or the
stamp of English builders, or the engineering of British companies, or even in
the names of railway stations.
The railways attracted many Britons
to Argentina.
They never constituted a wave of immigrants, but made a constant
and noticeable trickle. The railways were a secure and stable form of
employment as the companies expanded, even though the Emigrants' Information
Office, in London, cautioned throughout the 1870s that: "It cannot be too clearly pointed out that this
country is not one for British emigrants in speculative search of employment ...
The class of British emigrant to which this country is suited is the one who has
money to take up a holding and work it. With the rapid development and opening
up of the country which is in progress this class of person may sometimes be
able to make a good living ..."
Prosperity
The period is one of apparently
limitless money and wealthy men. One report, quoted in The Times of 21
March 1870, a survey of the cost of living in foreign cities, said: An old resident of Buenos Ayres assures Mr Stuart (a member of the British Legation's staff) that twenty years ago £1,000 a year was a good income there, and would maintain a numerous family, but that now a newly-married couple with £1,000 a year would have to study the very strictest economy and perhaps retire altogether from society; but, on the other hand, money is earned with great facility now, and at this day there is an amount of wealth in Buenos Ayres which would then have appeared incredible. Emergence of a British middle class By the late 1870s there was a British middle class, comfortable, insular and looked up to by the Criollo population, which Britons looked down on - just as Britons looked down on their closest competitors, the German community, which had the disadvantage of its divisions and periodical disputes.  A volume titled Twentieth Century Impressions of
Argentina, reviewing the last third of the nineteenth century, assured that
`Where the man from England has established himself he has done well'. The same
volume said that "The Briton in Argentina is not of Argentina. He always
looks forward to returning some day to his northern isles to end his days among
the associations of his youth. This is true more of the Englishman than of the
Scotsman or Irishman'. The May 1910 Centenary Supplement of the newspaper La
Nacion praised the British `who possess in the Republic an influence superior
to the rest of foreign nationalities ... No matter to what part of the Republic
you direct your view you will find British capital invested there."
The
middle-class family became stronger because of the stability of employment; the
people who spoke English were a step ahead, because the language associated them
with the management. A whole myth became solidly built around the British
nature. The aforementioned Twentieth Century Impressions of Argentina said that
"there are current sayings which speak for
themselves. If a verbal promise is made the native, to seal the contract,
usually says palabra de ingles (word of an Englishman), meaning that he will act
as an Englishman, whose word is his bond. If an appointment is made, and the
hour fixed, it is usual for the natives to say hora de ingles (Englishman's
time), meaning that the Englishman's hour, who is always on time, will be
observed. If a native has a house to let he prefers a Britisher, and generally
without contract or guarantee, knowing that the house will be cared for as if it
were his own, and all other conditions fulfilled. The provisions dealers are
delighted to deal with Britishers; they say they buy plenty and pay well. This
does not mean to say that all English-speaking people maintain the above
standards. Many times the natives are deceived."
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 As the British railways grew, many of their staff were specifically imported and trained for work in different sections of the companies. And as this crowd became larger, rows of English looking terraced or semi-detached houses were built in front of stations on the suburban lines. The houses were often built with bricks imported from Britain and most of the fittings were British-made too. But those were the smaller imports: entire stations - from railway terminals to signal boxes - were also shipped from Britain. In one case, what is today the La Plata central station was intended for India; but was re-routed at the time of shipment on the reception of news of disturbances and economic difficulties on the Indian subcontinent. British investment in related industries The growth of the railways naturally attracted commercial houses, funded and supported by trading concerns in London and in all the principal British ports. Insurance brokerages grew to take up most of the market, banking and finance enterprises grew with increased investment, and shipping lines added tonnage to their River Plate services to supply manufactured goods and machinery to the growing country. The construction of the railways was followed by British participation or ownership in all the public utility companies and public works, such as gas, tramways, water supply, docks, telegraph and, eventually, telephones and a share in electricity supply. The British companies, in banking insurance, land, water, shipping, etc., make a long list. Large family firms grew into small empires and the names of Drysdale, Duggan and Bell are now of historical note in Argentina's landowning and export business. Macadam and Maitland-Heriot were prominent in commerce; David Hogg, of Fife, operated a huge engineering supply company since 1874; James Smart made English tailoring a must in Buenos Aires as from 1888; Cassels was a name for gramophones and vacuum cleaners; Murchison and Whiting & Stevens were established ship-brokers; and a few more made `high society' of their own. Links to other Argentine railways sites Gallery of Argentina Very good set of sites. Industrial architecture biased
La Trochita - English article on
the railroad in Patagonia.
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