Line A (Buenos Aires Metro) - History

History

In the first decade of the 20th century in Buenos Aires road traffic had sharply increased due to increased population. In 1903 the city had 895,381 inhabitants and there were 4,791 horse-drawn carriages and 60 cars, while 1,457,885 people were living in 1913, with 6,211 carriages and 7,438 automobiles.

Because it was necessary to create new forms of mass transit, Congress awarded in 1909, by Law 6,700, the Ferrocarril del Oeste (FCO) (Buenos Aires Western Railway) to build a two-way underground railway that would join the main route of the Ferrocarril del Oeste, (currently Ferrocarril Domingo Faustino Sarmiento) near Sadi Carnot Street (now Mario Bravo) with the port. But on 28 December of that year the Municipality of the City of Buenos Aires gave a concession to the Compañía de Tranvías Anglo-Argentina (CTAA) (Anglo-Argentine Tramways Company), which operated 80% of the tram system-being perhaps the greatest in the world- to build an underground passenger rail service. The project included in its route the Plaza de Mayo-Plaza Miserere section in its stretch which had been granted to the railroad.

After a dispute, it was agreed that the Western Railway built the line for freight but only one track at a depth that would allow the passage of the passenger line CTAA build on a higher plane. Thus, construction of the Anglo-Argentina Line began on 15 September 1911, with the German company Philipp Holzmann & Cia. as contractor. The construction of this line involved hiring 1,500 workers and used 31 million bricks, 108,000 170 kg bags of cement, 13,000 t of iron braces and 90,000 square metres of insulating layer. The line obtained its current name, Line A, on 17 February 1939.

The Plaza de Mayo-Plaza Miserere subway section was inaugurated on 1 December 1913. On the following day it opened to the public, carrying 170,000 passengers who enjoyed the first subway in South America. Buenos Aires thus became the 13th city to have this service, behind London, Athens, Istanbul, Vienna, Budapest Glasgow, Paris, Boston, Berlin, New York, Philadelphia and Hamburg. Each station had a length of 100 metres and had friezes of specific colours for easy identification, taking into account the high level of illiteracy that existed at the time.

The construction of the Plaza Miserere station was performed by two companies, CTAA and FCO. At that time the station had two tracks for the railroad in the middle, and two pairs of lines for the metro, which were on the laterals. The outside southern track of the subway was eliminated in 1926 and it was decided to extend the platform to make the rail-subway transfer more convenient.

The route was extended to Río de Janeiro Station on 1 April 1914 and on 14 July of that year to Caballito, renamed Primera Junta in 1923. Beyond Primera Junta a ramp was built in 1915 in the center of Rivadavia Avenue between Cachimayo and Emilio Mitre streets, for trains to access the Polvorín workshop on Emilio Mitre and José Bonifacio streets, covering a surface loop shared with streetcar traffic until 1963. This 2 km route has been used since 1980 by Asociación Amigos del Tranvía (Association of Friends of the Tram) to run the Tramway Histórico de Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires Historical Tramway). The ramp was also used by surface passenger to the intersection of Lacarra and Rivadavia Avenues, a service that was canceled on 31 December 1926.

The investment to build the line was m$n 17 million. m$n 3 million is invested in the excavation of the tunnel, m$n 7 million in the construction, m$n 2.5 million in the initial 50 trains and m$n 2 million for the Polvorín workshop.