Taking salt to the sea

Salt carrying railways on Peninsula Valdes and further north along the line of the FCS Neuquen railway.

FC de la Península Valdés

On the Valdés Peninsula north-east of Puerto Madryn there are large salt pans lying well below sea level (see photo above). In 1900 Ernesto Piaggio obtained a government concession to build a 76cm. gauge railway from Puerto Piramides to the Salina Grande salt pan, twenty miles (34km.) inland (1). The line opened in June 1901, and was transferred to a salt extracting company, Ferro & Piaggio, owned by Piaggio, the brothers Alejandro and José Ferro and a Señor Munno (or Musso?) two years later. The Ferro brothers owned the largest estancia in the area and even today it is still in the Ferro family. Eventually the business, El Salinera Argentina, reverted to Piaggio y Cia. Ernesto Piaggio also ran ships down the Patagonian coast.

Somewhat puzzlingly, E. Piaggio applied for and was granted a concession to build a railway from the salt pans to an alternative port, San José on the north side of the isthmus, in 1904 (2). There is no evidence that this was ever begun, and it may well have been one of those proposals intended more to apply pressure on a third party than to be actually constructed.

The company had the rights to 15,000ha of the Salina Chica, but it was their 25ha in the Salina Grande which was worked for domestic salt. In the best years they extracted up to 12,000 tons.

The map extract below shows the peninsula, with the railway highlighted in red. This, and a larger scale extract further down the page, are taken from a Chubut land ownership map of the 1920s (3).

A locomotive and train in the salina. Mounds of salt can be seen.

The route
The railway had first to climb out of the salina, before traversing the flat top of the peninsula and finally finding a gentle way down into the hollow in which the small port of Puerto Piramides lies. It terminated at a muelle (jetty) which was built out on a natural rock platform. The terminus also had a workshop and a triangle for turning locos. Overall, the line was 32.357 kms. long.

In the photo below the line has reached the bottom of the port's bowl and crosses from bottom left to middle right before terminating top left at the muelle.

To confuse matters, the Admiralty chart section below (from chart no. 3226, edition of 1931) shows the line climbing northwards from the bay before turning east. This chart acknowledged an Argentine Government plan of 1917 as its source for topographic detail.

An enlarged extract of the land-ownership map shown earlier is reproduced below. The railway can be seen as a black and white hatched line leaving Pto. Piramides eastwards before turning ESE and running mostly on the south side of the original road to the salina. Two intermediate stations are marked before the line makes a final turn to drop north-eastwards into the depression holding the salt pan. The names Piaggio and Ferro, the railway's main backers, show up clearly as owners of a number of plots of land.

Puerto Piramides bay and basin from the south. The flat-topped nature of the peninsula can be seen. The muelle was at the left (west) end of the bay, and the railway ran from there back across the low ground before starting its climb eastward.

Tracing the route using Google Earth
Readers who have the Google Earth program can click on the following link:

ValdesGoogleEarthfiles.zip

Save the zip file to your hard disk. When you decompress it you will find that it contains three Google Earth KMZ data files.
• PuertoPiramide.kmz A static view of the Pto. Piramide terminus area as if from 500m up.
• Valdesstation1.kmz and Valdesstation2.kmz Static views of the conjectured sites of the intermediate stations as if from 500m up.
• SalinaGrande.kmz A static view of the probable site of the terminus in the salina.
• Valdestourpart1.kmz and Valdestourpart2.kmz Flights along the trackbed from Pto. Piramide to the first intermediate station, and from thence to the Salina Grande.

(Flights or 'tours' in this website are best done with the Google Earth touring preferences set to a camera tilt angle of about 60 degrees, and a camera range of about 300m)

Once the files are separated you can click on them and they should open in Google Earth and show the appropriate locations or trackbed tours. You may have to click the run button in Google Earth's 'Places' pallete. Generally the route is clearer without the overlying vector path being checked and visible.

As browsers develop we should be able to provide direct links from these webpages to call up Google Earth without the trouble of downloading and decompressing zip files but this is not yet reliable enough in all browsers.

Engines, wagons and a coach
The railway had five locomotives (3):

Wheel arrange-ment	Builder & number	Date built	Notes
0-4-0T	Krauss 2249	1890	Previously it has been assumed that this loco was bought from an earlier owner as it seemed to predate the Pen. Valdez railway by a decade. In the published O&K builder's lists (5) it is recorded as originally delivered via Arthur Koppel bearing the name 'Colonel Orzabal' but to whom is not known. However, the hill immediately east of Puerto Piramides, and adjacent to the track from the salina is named 'Cerro Olazabal'. It is at least possible that this was the loco's name, mangled in transcription; that it was delivered directly to this railway, and that the railway therefore dates from much earlier than the date of the official concession.
0-6-0T	Jung 451	1900	Purchased new via Authur Koppel, Berlin. 40hp, 7.4 tonnes. Constructed to 75cm gauge not 76cm (6).
0-6-0T or 0-6-2T?	O & K 3 un-known locos		There is confusion over these three locos. One of them has been quoted as O&K no. 1351 of 1904, but this was an 0-4-0T built to 60cm gauge. The 0-4-0 well tank remains still lying at Puerto Piramide have been attributed to this loco but are more likely to come from Krauss 0-4-0T no 2249 mentioned above. Unidentified O&K six -coupled locos built to 75/76cm gauge for Argentina between 1904 and 1915 include nos. 1280, 1492, & 3205. Since the creditors of the railway on its closure included Messrs Duhncrack und sohn who were O&K agents, it seems likely that they had been the ordering agents for the last locos,

The line possessed three or four stations and was obviously run as a proper passenger-carrying railway, for as well as ten bogie wagons there was a bogie passenger coach. A list dating from 1903 suggests that there were as many as thirty wagons in total, and one furgon (7). 1902 traffic figures quoted in the same report were 2330 tonnes of goods but no passengers.

Conflicting reports tell of rails weighing 3, 5 & 7 Kgs. per metre or 10, 15 and 27 Kgs which sound more likely. The latter figures come from the 1902 Estadística volume which also suggests that 15 kms. had steel sleepers whilst 17.8 kms. had wooden ones. Buildings were reported as being fairly precarious - galpones, houses and police post all being faced with corrugated iron, though that is not unusual in such a dry climate. In 1900 one driver was the father of George Thomas who became the station-master at Trelew (8). Passenger fares are recorded as having been $1m/n single and $1.50 m/n return.

The photo below shows what is probably the Krauss 0-4-0T at the same point as the picture above, just about to start the climb out of Puerto Piramides. The wagons are bogie stock with semi-circular ends. One of them has been converted into a water carrier.

The pictures on the left show wagons in the salina. Those in the first picture appear very different from those seen above. They seem to have substantial wooden sides.

The wagons in this picture may be the same as those in the previous one but this time the sides have been let down.

Closure
The 1926 US Dept. of Commerce report (9) suggests the railway went bankrupt in 1916. A webpage on Puerto Piramides suggests that the salt-extracting company got into trouble as early as 1904 and was eventually bought out in 1920 by Alejandro Ferro but that exploitation of the salt had ceased by then, and that the population declined thereafter until tourism began in the 1960s. It is notable that one of the creditors was the firm of Duhncrack und sohn, perhaps not fully paid for their locomotives.

Remains
As well as the bare frames of one of the locomotives lying in the village of Puerto Piramides, there are a few relics in the Peninsula Valdes Museum and Visitors' Centre. The picture left shows their collection of wheelsets, sleepers and stencil cut signs.

The trackbed is also clearly visible, to the south of the peninsula's perimeter road as it runs south east from Puerto Piramides.

The next photo shows the battered frames of the Krauss 0-4-0WT, as currently displayed on the shore at Puerto Piramide (10).

On the way to Neuquen

There were three salt mining areas along the route of the BAGSR's Neuquen line. Technically, being in La Pampa and Buenos Aires provinces, they are outwith the boundaries of Patagonia proper. However, they are included here for interest. Most of the information about these three sites comes from Señor Jorge Waddell's article on the industrial railways of the Neuquen route in Todo Trenes no. 32 (11).

Salina El Chancho - Señor Fortunato Anzoátegui
Señor Anzoátegui was a Uruguayan entrepreneur who had developed salt and timber interests in La Pampa. From 1918 onwards he developed the El Chancho salt pan, eventually building up an 80km network of broad gauge branches worked by FCS locos and stock. These radiated out from the FCS station named Anzoátegui. Anzoategui's company, the SA Salinera, Forestal, Agricola y Ganadera, may also have had two petrol engined shunters of its own. These are supposed to have been four-wheeled locos by Baldwin, built in 1918 for the US Army (12).

There was also a 60cm gauge network in the salina, using 100 wagons and a Baldwin loco from the decauville lines in Buenos Aires province. As well as these railways a cableway was also constructed.

Anzoategui's 60cm gauge skips dump salt on a big tip in this view from Arturo Coleman's autobiography.

The broad gauge activity lasted until the late 1960s by which time two ex FCS locos, an 11A and an 11B had been acquired.

Salina La Aurora
A 75cm gauge line was built by Señor B. Graciarena from the FCS station later named Nicolás Levalle. The motive power at the start in 1908 was an O&K 0-6-0T but later an assortment of internal combustion locos were used. Whilst the successor company still operates, the railway was abandoned in the 1980s though the O&K loco is preserved on site.

Salina Las Barrancas
This salina was operated from 1931 by Señor José Gerschman. It lies close to the previous mentioned location. He installed 1933 a 60cm gauge line, with equipment provided from the FCS 60cm gauge agricultural networks in Buenos Aires province. The main operation ran to the south side of Nicolás Levalle station and whilst this ceased in the early 1980s, smaller scale operations in the salina may still go on. Motive power was always by internal combustion, including eight Brookvilles purchased between 1933 and 1975.

References:
1 Date of the concession 10 January 1900, by law no. 3898; date of the contract and of the decree of approval 20 April 1900. Dates quoted in Estadística de los Ferrocarriles en explotación, tomo Xl, año 1902. 1903. Buenos Aires. p228.
2 Reports in The Review of the River Plate July 23 1904 p251, and October 8 1904 p739.
3 Chubut land ownership map, scale 1:500,000, found in the National Archives, Kew, London.
4 Industrial Railways of Argentina (a list of all known locos). revised 1998. Reg Carter. Duplicated, spiral bound. 46 Mill St., Kingston upon Thames, Surrey, KT1 2RF. UK.
5 O. & K. Dampflokomotiven - Lieferverzeichnis 1892-1945. R. Bude, K. Fricke & Dr. M. Murray, 1978. Railroadiana Verlag.
6 Locomotivfabriken, version 3. 2001. A CD-ROM of builders lists and other information by Jens Merte, in German.
7 Estadística de los Ferrocarriles en explotación, tomo Xl, año 1902. 1903. Buenos Aires. p228.
8 Informal interview with Mr. Thomas in 1975.
9 Railways of South America: Part I: Argentina. (William Rodney Long (& George S. Brady?), U.S. Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce - Trade Promotion Series No. 32, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington D.C. 1926.
10 Photo taken by Jorge Garreta Mendoza.
11 Los Industriales de la vía Neuquén. Jorge Waddell. in Todo Trenes no. 32, 2004. Buenos Aires.
12 Information from Industrial Railways of Argentina, 199?, Reg Carter. Kingston upon Thames, UK.

28-5-08