Qualla: 2012 Buenos Aires Rail Disaster

2012 Buenos Aires Rail Disaster: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kevin Gabbert - User: (WT-shared) Kevin James at wts wikivoyage, Public domain. It was the first ordinary morning after a holiday weekend, and the train was packed the way commuter trains always are when everyone returns to work at once. About a thousand people rode the eight crowded carriages of the Sarmiento Line service from the suburb of Moreno toward downtown Buenos Aires. As the train neared its final stop at Once Station, passengers did what tired commuters everywhere do - they pressed toward the front, crowding the lead carriages to be first out the doors. At 8:33 on the morning of 22 February 2012, the train failed to stop. It struck the buffers at the end of the track, and the second carriage telescoped seven meters into the first, exactly where the crowd was thickest. Fifty-one people were killed. More than 700 were injured. None of them had done anything but board a train to go to work.

Image: Kevin Gabbert - User: (WT-shared) Kevin James at wts wikivoyage | Public domain

2012 Buenos Aires Rail Disaster: Fifty-One People

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit (WT-en) Cjfrey at English Wikivoyage, Public domain. The numbers in a disaster can blur into abstraction, so it is worth holding onto what they meant. The fifty-one were students and laborers, clerks and parents, people with shifts to make and families expecting them home. They had crowded toward the front not out of carelessness b...

Image: (WT-en) Cjfrey at English Wikivoyage | Public domain

2012 Buenos Aires Rail Disaster: A Failure That Was Foreseen

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gobierno de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires from Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, Argentina, CC BY 2.0. This was not a freak event. The Sarmiento Line was operated by Trenes de Buenos Aires, the company controlled by the Cirigliano brothers, and it had killed before - a fatal crash at Flores just six months earlier, in September 2011. Investigators found that the train's working br...

Image: Gobierno de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires from Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, Argentina | CC BY 2.0

2012 Buenos Aires Rail Disaster: Mourning and Anger

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, CC BY 2.0. President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner declared two days of national mourning and suspended the Carnival festivities; the city's chief of government, Mauricio Macri, and the provincial governor did the same. Pope Benedict XVI sent his condolences. By chance, several ambulances ...

Image: Unknown author | CC BY 2.0

2012 Buenos Aires Rail Disaster: The Reckoning at Court

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0. Justice came slowly. A trial opened in March 2014 before a federal criminal court and ran for nearly two years, weighing both the crash itself and whether the railway and its overseers had committed fraud with public money. On 29 December 2015, the verdict came down: twenty-one p...

Image: Diego Delso | CC BY-SA 4.0