Elvino de Brito (Portugal)
This time the Railway Heritage World Blog, with a collaboration from Andreia Rodrigues, will present the old train station of Bragança (Portugal). Andreia is a student of history at Évora University; her hometown is Bragança, so she took some photos and told us how this building is used nowadays.
As such, we would like to present the Bragança Bus Station!
The History
This station, designed by the architect Veríssimo de Sá Correia, is located at 133,80km from the first city of the Tua Line and it was inaugurated in 1906, connecting Bragança and Mirandela. They used the narrow gauge to build this line and the building was built at the Campo de Santo António, an area a bit far away from the city center, thus, an avenue was requested and built to connect the city to the train station.
In 1947, the CP – Comboios de Portugal takes possession of the Tua Railway Line. The company created a kind of a Railway Museological Centre at Bragança station, which has a Railway Museum that is a part of the National Railway Museums web, but, currently, it is closed. With the passing time, the company started to suffer injuries, thus they decided to close the branch between Mirandela and Bragança (80km) in 1992.
The train station of Bragança is a part of a really sad history. The population fought a lot to keep the train running, but because of some political negligence, the city lost its railway. Some years later, this history got worse. Caused by some economic interests on the construction of a Dam, the government deactivated the whole Tua Line. People expressed their outrage during all the discussion about overflowing the railway line, but the government did not reverse the unpopular measures after the protests.
The Building and the City
The Bragaça train station became a bus station in 2004. The building receives international and national buses and it was designed as a big public space, which, according to Andreia, it is used by all people from all ages.
Carlos Praça, an architect at the Gabinete de Arquitetura e Serviços Ltda., designed the project making use of many elements like the parking lot, the railway halts and other buildings, connecting them with pedestrian areas. The vegetation helps to connect these areas too. There is a playground and it is interesting to see how they preserved and reused the railway elements. They used train parts to build some benches on the railway line, where people can wait for the bus. Besides that, there are many wagons, locomotives and documents preserved there trying to save the Tua Line history, but until now the Museum is not working.
Final Considerations
It is remarkable the way the railway elements are used along the recovered space. It makes clear that there was a railway passing there. Beyond the railway memory, it illustrates the overlap of the railway tracks by the paved roads. The whole area preserves the identity of the city, which will never forget that a train used to pass.
