Aguas Blancas 2-8-0 Locomotives in Chile

Class Matias Granja (Locobase 13621)

Data from Baldwin Locomotive Works Specification for Engines digitized by the DeGolyer Library of Southern Methodist University Volume 27, p. 77. For a short history of the railway, see Patricio Espejo Leupfn, "El Ferrocarril de Aguas Blancas", archived in Amigos del Tren at [], last accessed 8 June 2017. Works number was 24444 in July 1904.

Nine years after this design was delivered to the Huanchaca (Locobase 11568), the company returned to Baldwin for another. Matias Granja had a longer wheelbase and higher boiler pressure, but was otherwise essentially identical.

Exploitation of the nitrate deposits uncovered in the eponymous region which lay southwest of Antofagasta, Chile began in the 1870s and the first "oficina de parada" (small depots) opened as Esmeralda in February 1879. Six more followed, each poorly funded, which transported the nitrates to Antofagasta by wagon.

Unfortunately for these doughty pioneers, the government quickly imposed a tax on the extraction of nitrates in 1881 and established a regulatory regime over the region in 1884. These actions, whether by design or happenstance, squeezed the small propietors, bankrupting some and forcing the others to sell out to one of two principal consortia.

In the meantime, plans to build a railway into the region had been launched in 1881. Authorizations soon followed, expired, were extended, reauthorized, but all failed to lay a single metre of track. It wasn't until late 1898 that Granja y Domfnguez gained approval to build a 107 km (66.5 mile) line from Aguas Blancas to the coast at Caleta Coloso. (Antofagastinos fought the proposal to build a new port, but ultimately lost the battle.).

The Granja family--headed until 1905 by Matias Granja--figured much in the history of the business and the railway over the subsequent decade. Locobase brutally summarizes by pointing readers to the Spanish-language account of " uno de los grandes escándalos de la Tpoca y que revent= p blicamente en 1908" (one of the greatest scandals of the age, [which] burst into public view in 1908) in the essay cited above.

The Aguas Blanca joined the Antofagasta (Chile ) & Bolivia (FCAB) in 1908, at which point 4 was renumbered 524.