Desmontaje y olvidado: los residuos metálicos del ferrocarril de Bragança - PA (1883-1965)

Abstract

The railroads in Brazil were of paramount importance for the agricultural economy expanded by several places in the country in the middle of the 19th and 20th centuries, among these, the Amazon region. In this context, there was the Estrada de Ferro de Bragança (EFB), being the first railway implanted in the Brazilian Amazon, built in mid-1883-1908. After decades of activity, the road that connected Belém (capital of PA) to Bragança (Northeast of PA, concentration of agricultural production colonies) was deactivated in 1965. The closure of EFB activities triggered a series of transformations in its railway collection, among the items were metal parts used in the composition of the railroad in a structural way and ornamental integrated goods. The dismantling of such metallic items touches on the discussion of their origin: industrial, serial and mobile. With this, the present research aimed to contribute with the systematization of information regarding the discussion of the abundant use of metallic items in the composition of the EFB, the destination of such pieces after the deactivation of the railway, and also in terms of theoretical reflections on the architecture as a document. The methodology was developed through the use of historical sources (official documents and periodicals), with a temporal cut of the period of the assembly of the railroad 1883-1908 and the consequences of the disassembly (decades 1960-1990), the theoretical reflection was based on works of Restoration Theory as The Objective Restoration by Antoni González Moreno-Navarro (1999) and Contemporary Theory of Restoration by Salvador Muñoz Viñas (2010).