Line A (Buenos Aires Metro)

Line A (Buenos Aires Metro)

Line A is the oldest line of the Buenos Aires Metro. It runs from Plaza de Mayo to Carabobo, and is scheduled to be extended towards San Pedrito.

Opened to the public on 1 December 1913, the first metro in South America, the Southern Hemisphere and the Spanish-speaking world, it made Buenos Aires the 13th city in the world to have an underground transport service. It stretches 10.7 km from Plaza de Mayo and Carabobo and runs under all of the Avenida de Mayo and part of the Avenida Rivadavia, and is used by 216,000 people a day. Carabobo station is a temporary terminal, as an extension to the west via Flores to the final terminal, Nazca, is under construction.

The construction, carried by cut and cover, was finished with details that made it the most secure, comfortable and modern in the world. A smart natural ventilation system, a unique interior visual identity system for each station to help passenger identification, stairways built with granite one-block steps, perfect illumination...all came together to reflect the splendour of Buenos Aires in those times. On the first day of public service (December 18, 1913), it carried 220,000 awed passengers. Line 1 is an icon of the city of Buenos Aires and still uses the same cars used at its inauguration. These cars were built by Belgian company La Brugeoise starting in 1913 and were refurbished in 1926 when their wooden structure was modified for underground-only use. In 1915 the line was extended to the intersection of Avenidas Lacarra and Rivadavia, where trains ran at street level until 1926. A peculiarity of the original "pantograph" cars on the "underground tramway" is that until 1926 they had both low doors at the ends for boarding from the street and high doors in the middle for loading from platforms in the tunnel. For this reason, "Subte" Line A might also be considered one the continent's first "light rail metro".

At present two new stations after Carabobo are under construction: San José de Flores and San Pedrito (formerly Nazca), the new future terminal. Newer metro carriages are slowly being introduced to handle the increased ridership and demand. Line A transports +190,000 passengers per working day

Near the Primera Junta metro station, in the neighbourhood of Caballito, there is a historical tramway museum maintained by tram fans that operates on city streets on weekends.