Documentación clave para comprender las estaciones de ferrocarril: los manuales franceses de construcción de caminos de hierro

Abstract

The construction of the railways involved technical design aspects very similar in different countries in reference to the manner of installation of railways, management and maintenance. In Argentina, the English and French enterprises were the precursors in the installations of various rails across the length and the width of the territory. The key of its efficacy was the development of normative instruments which comprised all the railway system. The combination of the rules, texts, illustrations and plans involved an accessible documentation with a common and comprehensive language that emphasized the constructive precision. The antique planimetry and the construction manuals of railways are primary fonts of great value which allows us the cognizance about how it had been built during the past and understand the valued heritage legacy through an exhaustive knowledge of the goods. Moreover, they are component parts of the industrial railways system so it is a heritage not frequently visible.The objective of this work is to make a relationship between the construction manners of some components of the railways system with the registered typologies in plans in order to determine some key construction about the railways architecture. This work consists of the study of different published manuals from the 1860s decade until the middle of the 20th century and involved the analysis of antique planimetry of the railways archives of the cities of Tucuman and Salta in Argentina.