Transandine Railway Beyer-Garratt Locomotives in Argentina

Class E12 (Locobase 567)

Ferrocarril General Belgrano. Some data provided by Carlos Alberto Fern+ndez Priotti in Bryan Attewell ([] Steam Locomotive simulator program (April 2000), corrected and supplemented by data from Gavin Hamilton's excellent compilation of Garratt data posted at [] (6 September 2005); and and "Argentine Transandine Railway-Design 1143", Beyer-Garrrat Patent Articulated Locomotives (Manchester, England: Beyer-Peacock & Company Limited, 1931), archived on flickr's Historical Railway Images at [], et seq, p. 30. See also Ian Thomson, "The Transandine Railway: a Hundred Year Long Financial Disaster that still

Attracts Investors" at [], last accessed 20 September 2022.

B-P's 1931 catalogue described the TAR as "one of the most interesting in the world." These Garratts operated on the Mendoza-Polvaredas section, a part that didn't use a rack to scale very steep grades. Their operating area covered 80 miles (129 km) on a profile that rose 4,500 ft (1,372 metres) and presented a ruling grade of 2.5%

B-P quoted from a 30 June 1930 General Manager's Report a passage that credited Garratts with a 29% coal consumption savings per axle kilometre on the adhesion section. The GMR report added that because cattle traffic had "decreased very considerably"-- most likely because of the worldwide Great Depression, the trains didn't run a full capacity and "the maximum economies from the use of the Garratts could not be obtained."