Taking salt to the sea Salt carrying railways on Peninsula Valdes, at Cabo Blanco near Puerto Deseado, 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 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 Save the zip file to your hard disk. When you decompress it you will find that it contains three Google Earth KMZ data files. 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 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.
Closure
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).
Cabo Blanco Approximately 50 miles north of Puerto Deseado there is a large salina just inland from the Cabo Blanco headland. In pre-frigorifico days salt was much valued in the area for the preservation of meat and skins of sheep and of seals. Thus it was no surprise when in 1899 Don Miguel Martínez applied for a concession for two areas within the salina (14). Surveying work commenced in 1901 with a view to extracting the surface deposits, though in fact the deeper reserves have been estimated at between 15 and 40 million tons. Extraction began in 1902, by L. Parmiggiani et Cia. under the title of the Compañía de las Grandes Salinas de Cabo Blanco, and in time a sizable community grew up, with lodging houses for workers post office, court house, police station and school. It seems to have been a lawless place, with reports in La Prensa and La Nacion of murders and assaults. A narrow gauge railway was soon constructed from the salina to the bay south of Cabo Blanco, a distance of 5.6km. This was worked by a Krauss 0-4-0T locomotive apparently of 1890, hauling wagons carrying the sacks of salt. The precise gauge is not clear but is likely to have been either 60 or 75cm. The website quoted above includes references to press reports of ships loading up to 3000 tonnes at a time, so the annual output will at times have been very substantial. The salt extraction apparently ceased around 1930, owing to the difficulties of getting workers to the isolated site and the costs of sending the salt north by sea. The warehouses are reported to have been intact in 1941 but gradually delaying thereafter. In addition to the salt railway proper, a short 60cm line seems to have been installed at Cabo Blanco whilst the lighthouse was being constructedbetween 1915 and 1918. This is covered in the lighthouses page of this chapter. Tracing the route using Google Earth Save the file to your hard disk. Double click on it to open the Google Earth program. (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) You may have to click the run button in Google Earth's 'Places' pallete, or the 'Play tour' button under the 'Tools' header. Generally the route is clearer without the overlying vector path being checked and visible. 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 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 Salina Las Barrancas The photo below was taken about 1990 (13). It shows a four-wheeled Brookville diesel hauling a number of bogie wagons laden with salt across a public highway (Ruta 22, the main road west from Bahia Blanca to Neuquen).
A number of other photos taken at the same time are available in an appendix page. References: 10-7-10 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
 | | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
