About this journey

Tigre station sits at the edge of the Paraná Delta, some 28 km north of Buenos Aires city, and serves as the northern terminus of the Mitre Line's broad-gauge commuter corridor into the capital. The line has deep roots: it was built and first operated by the British-owned Buenos Aires Northern Railway, joining Tigre and Retiro in 1857. Financial difficulties led to a takeover by the Central Argentine Railway in 1888, and the Argentine state absorbed all the railways in 1948 under Juan Perón.

The line's most consequential engineering milestone came in 1916, when the Retiro–Tigre section was electrified — making it the first electrified railway system in South America. Electrification brought new British Thomson-Houston multiple units; nearly a century later, in November 2014, the fleet was renewed again with 12 CSR-built electric trains, replacing rolling stock from the 1960s at a cost of 250 million US dollars. The CSR SIFANG EMU visible throughout this cab ride is part of that same fleet, operated since 2 March 2015 by state-owned Operadora Ferroviaria Sociedad del Estado.

The journey ends at Retiro, the largest railway complex in Buenos Aires, where three separate terminal stations — Retiro-Mitre, Retiro-Belgrano, and Retiro-San Martín — share a single site alongside an underground station complex. The ride thus spans the full length of a corridor that connects a river-delta town to the busiest commuter rail hub in the Argentine capital.