Line A of Buenos Aires Underground

Line A is the oldest line of the Buenos Aires Underground. Opened to the public on 1 December 1913, it was the first underground line in South America, the Southern Hemisphere and the Spanish-speaking world. It made Buenos Aires the 13th city in the world to have an underground transport service. The line stretches 9.8 km from Plaza de Mayo and San Pedrito and runs under the full length of the Avenida de Mayo and part of the Avenida Rivadavia, and is used by 258,000 people per day.On the first day of public service, it carried 220,000 passengers. Line A used the cars used at its inauguration for just under a century. These cars were built by Belgian company La Brugeoise starting in 1913 and were refurbished in 1927 when their wooden structure was modified for underground-only use.

A peculiarity of the original "pantograph" cars on the "underground tramway" was that until 1926 they had both low doors at the ends for boarding from the street and high doors in the middle for loading from…