to build an underground passenger rail service. After a dispute, it was agreed that the Western Railway would use the line for freight, but only on one track in a manner that would allow the passage of the AATC passenger line. Thus, construction of the Anglo-Argentine Line began on 15 September 1911, with the German company Philipp Holzmann & Cia as contractor. The construction of this line involved hiring 1,500 workers and used 31 million bricks, 108,000 bags of cement, of iron braces, and of insulating material. The total investment to build the line was m$n17 million. m$n 3 million was invested in the excavation of the tunnel, m$n 7 million in construction, m$n 2.5 million in the initial 50 trains and m$n 2 million for the Polvorín Workshop. The Plaza de Mayo-Plaza Miserere section was inaugurated on 1 December 1913. On the following day it opened to the public, carrying 220,000 passengers. It was the first underground railway in South America, the Southern Hemisphere and the Spanish speaking world. Buenos Aires thus became the 13th city in the world to have an underground railway, behind London, Athens, Istanbul, Vienna, Budapest, Glasgow, Paris, Boston, Berlin, New York, Philadelphia, and Hamburg. Each station was 100 metres in length and had friezes of specific colours for easy identification. The construction of the Plaza Miserere station was carried out by two companies, AACT and FCO. At that time the station had two tracks for the railway in the middle, and two pairs of lines for the underground, which were on the laterals. The outside southern track of the subway was eliminated in 1926 and it was decided to extend the platform to make the rail-underground transfer more convenient. The route was extended to Río de Janeiro Station on 1 April 1914 and on 14 July of that year to Caballito, renamed Primera Junta station in 1923. Beyond Primera Junta a ramp was built in 1915 in the centre of Rivadavia Avenue between Cachimayo and Emilio Mitre streets, for trains to access the Polvorín Workshop on Emilio Mitre and José Bonifacio streets, covering a surface loop shared with tram traffic until 1963. This 2 km route has been used since 1980 by the Asociación Amigos del Tranvía (Association of Friends of the Tram) to run the Buenos Aires Historical Tramway. The ramp had originally taken passengers to the surface at the intersection of Lacarra