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The Buenos Ayres Great Southern Railway

4-6-0 Tender Locomotive order No. 9432 works No 4773 supplied in 1906

This was a British-owned Company. Construction started in 1864 and by 1947 the track length was 5080 miles. The first order from them was for 27 4-4-0 5'6" gauge passenger engines delivered in 1882/3, succeeding orders bringing the total of this their Class 6 to 69, the initial ones were "simples" and later ones were 2 -cylinder compounds. This Railway came next after the New South Wales Govt. Railways (622) and the Dutch State Railways (567) in a league table of purchasers of the largest number of engines from Beyer Peacock - the BAGSR's total was 416 by the time their last orders - Beyer Garratts (12 4-8-2 + 2-8-4) and 20 4-8-0 with 3-cylinders and 3 sets of Walschaerts valve motion, one of the heaviest and most powerful goods engines ever built for Argentina, both types delivered in 1928. Besides those types just mentioned, the most commonly ordered types were 2-6-0s (116 in several designs) and 4-6-0 (also 116 of those in several designs). There were 35 of the 2-8-0 wheel arrangement, a small number of passenger tank engines and shunting and goods tank engines too. The most unusual was an order for 5 "Singles", 4-2-2 delivered in 1890 that remained in service until 1935. These had 6'6" dia. "drivers" and were the last "Singles" made by BP, the two supplied to the Great Northern Rly of Ireland in 1885 were the only others made by BP in this wheel arrangement and also the only ones of that type ever in Ireland and theirs only lasted until 1904 when reconstructed as 4-4-Os and in that form those lasted until 1956. In the nationalisation of Argentina's railway companies from 1/3/1948, the BAGSR became part of the Ferrocarril General Roca.

Information provided by Joe Lloyd