Museo Ferroviario
The Museo Ferroviario is located behind the Retiro Station near the center of Buenos Aires. You enter via a trashy parking lot through a gate in a chain link fence. When I visited, I was greeted by a friendly man who was burning a pile of garbage.
I could see this was going to be a great place.
This exquisite one-eighth scale steam locomotive model thrilled me. Engines like this one took me to New York City when I was little.
Twenty years ago, Paul Theroux observed that the Chinese were still building steam locomotives in Datong, and were using them extensively in their coal-rich country. I wonder if they still are. That would be, for me, an entirely sufficient reason to visit China—just to ride the last steam trains.
The year I was born, the world held maybe two and a half billion people, most living in the countryside. Today there are seven, primarily jammed into conurbations where pollutants concentrate. So coal-burning, inefficient steam engines can't be used anymore.
But if you've ever stood beside one of these panting monsters, belching acrid smoke and cinders, driving wheels slipping while pulling out of the station, you'll understand why some are sad to see them go.
The Museo Ferroviario is disorganized and junky. My kind of place. It's run by Pedro here and his sidekick, two totally committed railroad buffs. They warmly invited me, the only visitor that day, clearly pleased to have a curious fellow spirit to show around.
I found Pedro in his old-fashioned wooden office chair, carefully making entries in a ledger and chain smoking. His office looks mussy and homey. A heavy piece of gear rests on the floor to his left, an iron transmission lever leans over his desk.
So much to see, so many pictures to choose from. Here's just a few.
I just love this handcar. Railroad wheels with spokes! Bicycle seats, handle bars, a pair of cranks—it was meant to be ridden along the tracks for inspections. The crossbars are deeply dropped, as if ladies in full skirts might ride the machine.
But of course they didn't. The design is intended to make life easy for workers who had to dismount frequently as they made their rounds.
The railroads were built by the British, with whom Argentineans have had a close, if sometimes turbulent relationship for a couple of centuries. You see evidence in the designs of everything, from locomotives to water filters.
Jean and I could use a good germ intercepting filter in our home in Mexico.
The bathrooms in passenger cars contained stools of finely patterned china.
(I seem to have a fascination with bathrooms; something to check with my therapist.)
This next gadget illustrates a solution to a problem. Here you are at Retiro. You have a train on a siding you want to send up to Rosario. Is the track clear?
This apparatus signals the state of the track. It tells you when a train is occupying the track or if it is free. Pedro tells me there was never an accident on an Argentinean railroad while these indicators were used.
—§—
You all learned Morse Code when you were a Scout, didn't you? You know: A=dih-dah, B=dah-dit-dit-dit, C=dah-dih-dah-dit...
OK. Maybe you didn't learn it. But we nerdy kids did. Had to, to get our amateur radio operator's licenses. Had to send and receive fifteen words a minute. Hard—for me, anyway.
It was harder for Spanish speakers. I didn't realize this until I saw a placard giving the codes for accented letters: Á=dih-dah-dih-dah...
Seven more letters to learn. I bet they didn't bother sending accented letters. I'm sure the sense was clear without them. And I notice they didn't go through the formality of assigning codes to ch, ll, or rr; all once considered parts of the Spanish alphabet.
By the way, is Ä actually used in Spanish writing? (=dih-dah-dah-dih-dah)
If your Morse is rusty, you always have the phone. This looks like something made by the Acme Company in a Warner Brothers cartoon.
Hello central, give me Doctor Jazz.
He's got what I need, I say he has...
Most places in the world, conductors used whistles to signal to the engineer that everyone was on board and ready to go. But in a few really cool countries, they blew horns.
I think if they started using horns again, more people would choose the train. How could they not?
Please forgive me if I now briefly indulge myself in some geek porn. This here is a rectifier. It converts AC into DC.
It's an 8' tall vacuum tube; bigger than any other I've seen. It had to be big. It provided the current to operate electrically powered trains. Check out the eight anodes arranged around the bottom of the bulb, each contained in an elaborate extension of the envelope. A glassblowing masterpiece. Look at the fan at the bottom with the cast aluminum blades. If that sucker ever seized up, the whole shebang would melt down in a minute.
The great railway museums of the world have scores of locomotives. The British National Railway Museum in York must have a hundred. The Museo Ferroviario has a single, pathetic, narrow gauge one, all tarted up with red and silver trim, the way Argentineans like to embellish industrial antiques. It's lovely.
It wasn't built for use on the narrow gauge section of the Transandean Railway; it's older than that road. But maybe it saw service there anyway, in the 30s. Two round windows in the engineer's cab mark it as a British design, probably manufactured there as well.
The Museo Ferroviario isn't a great museum. But it's one of the most satisfying to visit. You can get up close to the displays. You can touch most anything there. And you've got Pedro, the Museum Director, to personally guide you.