Puente Alsina railway station

Puente Alsina railway station, (Estación Puente Alsina in Spanish) is an Argentine railway station in the Greater Buenos Aires neighbourhood of Valentín Alsina in the Lanús partido of Buenos Aires Province. The neighbourhood was named after Valentín Alsina, a lawyer and politician who in 1852 had a brief term of office as governor of the city of Buenos Aires. The station takes its name from the nearby bridge of Puente Alsina over the Riachuelo River. On the other side of this bridge lies the neighbourhood of Nueva Pompeya within the city of Buenos Aires.

Built by the British-owned Buenos Aires Midland Railway (BAM), the station was opened in about 1910 as the terminus for their metre gauge line to Carhué, in the southwest of the province. The original plan was to boost the importance of the line by extending it from Puente Alsina into the centre of the nearby city. However, the fact that the company held a concession from the province, meant that it was unable to enter the Federal Capital. When the entire Argentine railway network was nationalized in 1948, during Juan Peron's presidency, the BAM became part of the state-owned company Ferrocarril General Manuel Belgrano.

As part of the privatization of the Argentine railways in 1990’s the private company Metropolitano was granted a concession to operate the service, part of the Linea Belgrano Sur, as far as General Belgrano, from 1 May 1994. In spite of the large state subsidies received by the company, a serious decline in the standard of its services led to the concession being revoked on 22 May 2007, after which the line has been run by UGOFE.

Bibliography

*Colin M. Lewis, British Railways in Argentina 1857-1914: A Case Study of Foreign Investment, Athlone Press (for the Institute of Latin American Studies, University of London), 1983.
*H.R.Stones, British Railways in Argentina 1860-1948, P.E.Waters & Associates, Bromley, Kent, England, 1993.