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Buenos Aires and Rosario Railway
The Buenos Aires and Rosario Railway (BA&R) was a British-owned railway company that built and operated a broad gauge railway network in Argentina, where it was known as the Ferrocarril Buenos Aires y Rosario.
On 10 September 1870 the Buenos Aires Province awarded Guillermo E. Matti the concession to build a line from Buenos Aires to Campana, a port on the River Parana. In April 1874 Matti formed the Compania del Ferrocarril a Campana , the line was opened on 8 April 1876, and later a further concession was granted to the company for an extension to Zarate and Rosario. On 9 May 1885 the company changed its name to the BA&R. The first train between Buenos Aires and Rosario (North Station) ran on 1 February 1886, a momentous occasion because until this time railway developments in Argentina had centred around the cities of Buenos Aires and Rosario but now, for the first time, the cities were linked.
From this point on the rate of expansion of the company increased and from Rosario the line was extended to Galvez (October 1886), Rafaela (March 1887), Sunchales (June 1887), La Banda (September 1890) and Tucuman (February 1891). Branch lines were built from San Lorenzo to Puerto San Martin and Puerto Cerana (1889), from Bernardo de Irigoyen to Santa Fe (1892), Galvez to San Francisco (1890), from La Banda to Santiago del Estero (February 1891), and from Cevil Pozo to El Chanar (1896).
On 9 August 1890 the company acquired a 22 km line from Coghlan junction, on the main line, to Tigre, which put the company in direct competition with the Central Argentine Railway (CA).
By the mid 1890s the BA&R was the second largest British-owned railway company in Argentina and was effectively challenging the CAs monopoly of the north-west of the country. On 20 September 1900 the BA&R bought the 490 km metre gauge rail network built by the British-owned company Santa Fe and Cordoba Great Southern Railway (SF&CGS). The sale included a concession already granted to the SF&CGS for the extension of their network from La Carlota to Rio Cuarto which the BA&R opened on 26 March 1902.
In 1908 the company was taken over by the Central Argentine Railway.
References
Colin M. Lewis, British Railways in Argentina 1857-1914: A Case Study of Foreign Investment, Athlone Press , 1983.
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Buenos Aires and Rosario Railway
