The British and The Wilde Railway Station
Argentina's two biggest railways were built by the British, owned and operated Central Argentine Railway Ltd and the Buenos Ayres Great Southern Railway Co. Ltd, with headquarters in London with offices and settlements in Wilde and Quilmes. 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 from Constitución railway station to La Plata with stops in Wilde and Quilmes 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.
Read more about this topic: Wilde, Buenos Aires
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