The Train of Death
In 1871, during the epidemic of yellow fever in Buenos Aires, a railway line was added to function as a receiver of coffins. This branch left from “Bermejo” station, located on the south-east corner of the homonymous street (now “Jean Jaurés”) and Avenida Corrientes, and reached what is now the Parque Los Andes, where there was a cemetery which was later moved to the current La Chacarite Cemetery. It was known as the “train of death”, and as well as the mortuary in Bermejo there were two others located on the south-east corners of Corrientes and Medrano and of Corrientes and Scalabrini Ortiz (then called Camino Ministro Inglés). John Allan, the above-mentioned first driver of La Porteña, drove this gloomy train and fell victim to the epidemic at the age of 36.
Read more about this topic: Buenos Aires Western Railway
Famous quotes containing the words train and/or death:
“Perfect present has no existence in our consciousness. As I said years ago in Erewhon, it lives but upon the sufferance of past and future. We are like men standing on a narrow footbridge over a railway. We can watch the future hurrying like an express train towards us, and then hurrying into the past, but in the narrow strip of present we cannot see it. Strange that that which is the most essential to our consciousness should be exactly that of which we are least definitely conscious.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)
“And of the other things death is a new office building filled with modern furniture,
A wise thing, but which has no purpose for us.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)