A HELP OF THE DESTINY

An old drawing of the speed plate used by former EFCB



A routine rail incursion in Pedro Leopoldo's area ended for putting me face to face with a sensational file of former EFCB railroad forgotten in an old car shelter in the proximities of the old Workshop of Carpentry of the Central. It is the file of the extinct 12a Residence of EFCB. If the action of the time and the insects was not enough on that documentation, the file had also been discovered for criminals of the area that, don't please with the depredation that they did at the place, ended for setting on fire the file. The burns of that paper work turned off an important part of the national rail history. We lost the link that united us to the past of glory of the Central do Brasil railroad. This and other fires in rail files that I witnessed in turning off of the lights of RFFSA remembers me of the ancient report fire of Alexandria Library, that destroyed very important informations about the civilizations of the antiquity. Historians say that the humanity suffered one thousand year-old delay with the destruction of that library, of so big was the loss in scientific knowledgement. In our case, the damage was just historical and social. With the loss of official documents of the old EFCB, we also lost the chance to understand the day by day of a state owned company that took the progress to the state of Minas Gerais and whow it affected the life of the society of its time. But nor everything is lost. I got to save many documents in that first encounter with the file. Among the found preciousness, they are books of personnel's point (some dated of the turning of the séc. XIX), dozens of volumes of the rare Bulletins of Personnel of EFCB, and many other important documents to rebuild the history of Central were saved. Among those documents there were the reports on the enlargement of the line up to Sete Lagoas, for instance.
The delay in getting an authorization of the then RFFSA for the retreat of the remaining of the material ended for leaving it exposed still more to the vandalism and a lot of thing finished losing forever. Among the rarities of EFCB that I got to save it was one entitled “Bulletin of Train´s Accidents”, from January to December of 1952. When browsing the first pages, I had a larger surprise: they were, in their majority, reports with the narrow gauge Texas type locomotives. As I understood, the EFCB was concerned with the constant derailments of those locomotives and it made a collection of data of all of the occurrences related to them. The document lances a new light about the performance of those locomotives in the state of Minas Gerais.