Central Station of Buenos Aires

The Central Station (in Estación Central) was a railway station in the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina, which operated from 1872 to 1897. The station was a union station of Buenos Aires shared by most of the separate railway companies existing by then, and functioned as terminus of most of the railway lines thus allowing passengers to connect conveniently between them. It was built in 1872 and located by what was then the shores of the Rio de la Plata next to the current Casa Rosada. The station building was a wood structure built in Great Britain, that had a slate mansard roof and a little tower with a clock and a dome on the top. When the Puerto Madero was inaugurated in 1897, the railway tracks of the Central Station blocked the access from the city to the port, and after a fire in 1897 use of the station was abandoned. From the 1850s onwards, railway lines began to connect the city of Buenos Aires with the surrounding cities and ports. All the different British railway companies then operating in Argentina initially opened each their own railway station as the terminals of their railway lines originating in Buenos Aires. Eventually, however they managed to reach an agreement to share a joint station, thus allowing passengers to connect conveniently between them. By August 1872 all the railway companies operating in the city signed the agreement for a common use of the Central Station, which until then had been owned by Buenos Aires and Ensenada Port Railway (BA&EP). The new station was inaugurated on 12 August 1872 in a ceremony attended by the President of Argentina Domingo Faustino Sarmiento. The use of the station was shared by five railway companies, the Buenos Aires and Ensenada Port Railway (BA&EP), the Buenos Aires Western Railway (BAWR), the Buenos Aires and Pacific Railway (BA&P), the Buenos Aires and Rosario Railway (BA&R), the Buenos Aires Northern Railway (BANR) and the Central Argentine Railway (CA).

TrainStation data from Wikidata (CC0). Summary from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).