More than 20 million pesos were raised in a virtual auction of subway cars that were used in different lines of the Buenos Aires network and that had gone out of circulation due to mechanical failures or because their age did not allow them to be adapted to the new transport circulation requirements. underground.Although the identity of the buyers is not known, it is known that the units were acquired in the city of Buenos Aires and the province of Buenos Aires.The auction exceeded the expectations of the organizers since the units were published with a base price of between 25,000 and 30,000 pesos and the offers of potential buyers were raising the price, mainly on the closing of the auction yesterday at 2:00 p.m., and they ended up selling for an average of $2,000,000 each.On the edge of the time established as a limit, the largest number of proposals appeared and there was a bid that lasted for several hours between 37 participants who were fighting to keep one of the cars.Offers also came from Córdoba, La Pampa and Mendoza.The wagons, manufactured in the 30s and 40s, now passed into private hands to endure in history with different uses, very different from passenger transport: for example, turning them into gastronomic enterprises or adding them to a home as a barbecue.Others, on the other hand, look for them as scrap and to sell their parts separately, especially iron.The virtual auction was carried out by the Narvaezbid company, which is in charge of holding national and international auctions for large or small companies.The total proceeds, of $21,290,000, will be invested in network projects, although Subterráneos de Buenos Aires SA (Sbase) announced that they have not yet defined a specific destination.The website where the auction was published received some 23,000 visits and there were 1,949 offers that were filtered until there were 37 competitors who followed until the end.“Any person could participate, natural or legal, for free and without the obligation to purchase, just by registering on the website.Once the conditions are accepted, a deposit of $10,000 had to be made, which was refunded 100%, whether the buyer was or not.While the auction was online, anyone could bid and most of the proposals entered at the last minute”, explained Federico Failase, marketing manager of Narvaezbid.“Shortly before closing, yesterday at 2:00 p.m., a countdown began for bidders to improve their offer.When there was a new proposal, a clock gave three minutes of margin to receive another offer;if none came, the previous one won”, he told about the auction mechanism.The ten cars sold yesterday are part of a batch of 45 Siemens Schuckert units in disuse.The remaining 35 will be sold at upcoming auctions. The wagons were manufactured in 1934, 1937 and 1944 and circulated for years on all lines except B. When they began to serve they were new, but over the years they wore out .In 2016, as reported by Sbase, the trains had a high failure rate: on Line H, they numbered 27 every 100,000 km;for comparison, the Alstom 300 units had two failures every 100,000 km.In addition, due to its age, it was not convenient to adapt it to the new signaling systems that were being implemented in the subway and they did not comply with the acceleration and braking rates, therefore, the investment of time and money to keep them operational was not necessary. convenient."These are old cars that were obsolete and did not meet the requirements to ensure safety and service," added Failase.The buyer has to take care of the removal of the wagons with a crane truck to move them.The other auctions will be held later to guarantee a careful and careful withdrawal of the cars that were auctioned yesterday,” he said.Yesterday's auction was not the first since Sbase carried out others that featured the La Brugeoise wooden wagons, of Belgian origin, which were part of the historic fleet of line A and did not have historical protection as a great part of the batch, and other Siemens and Fiat units that circulated on lines H and D.In other parts of the world, disused rolling stock is also sold as railway leftovers, as scrap, or they are marketed to other countries to be reused.They are also used in other enterprises or discarded at sea.In New York, in 2015, more than 2,000 cars were thrown into the sea to create an artificial reef and only 19 units, from different eras of the Subway, were restored and are on display at the New York Museum of Transportation.What happens in the rest of the world?In London (England) the Transport Museum preserves several cars and locomotives of the Underground and the Metropolitan Railway, with an important role of civil society in the conversation of rolling stock.In Montreal (Canada), the Transport Society launched a public call to buy and reuse some of the 336 original Montréal Métro cars that have been in service for the last 50 years.The Metro authorities decided to preserve only three cars and there will be one more in a railway museum.In Barcelona (Spain) the firm Transports Metropolitans de Barcelona (TMB), in 1999, recovered and restored three cars from the original series (M1, M6 and M8) on the occasion of the celebration of the 75th anniversary of the Metro.Paris (France), meanwhile, despite the large number of preserved vehicles and their great diversity, few are visible to the public;and in Budapest (Hungary) the old fleet of wooden cars was recast in metal in the 1970s and only an original triple remains on display in a museum.Copyright 2022 SA THE NATION |All rights reservedDownload the application of LA NACION.It is fast and light.Do you want to receive alert notifications?A connection error has occurred