A DAY WITH NO CELEBRATION, BUT TO BE CELEBRATED!
The line was to be inaugurated by then emperor Dom Pedro II, and the city of São João del-Rei awaited him with a grand celebration. In Tiradentes, anticipation was enormous, with people dressing in their finest and most elegant attire. However, the Minister of Agriculture, Buarque de Macedo, who was accompanying the emperor on the journey, suddenly fell ill and passed away in São João del-Rei, leading to the cancellation of all festivities. Dom Pedro II inaugurated the railway and visited Tiradentes Station, but in a discreet manner.
And so our history began! After that, the steam train, or “little train” as many affectionately call it, became part of everyday life, work, love stories, families, dreams... people's lives!
Cotidiano na Estação Tiradentes. Ramiro Nascimento, 1982. Acervo pessoal.
Simplicity in form, elegance in detail
At the time of EFOM's inauguration, Tiradentes was a rural town, with little economic relevance to the region. The railway station, therefore, is small, and its architecture is simple. Designed in an eclectic style, it mimics English countryside railway stations, featuring a masonry building for the station's social activities and a covered platform for passenger boarding and disembarking.
Despite the simplicity of its architecture, the station features striking ornamental details, such as the eaves of the platform roof, carefully finished with lambrequins, as well as a garden with influences from classical landscape architecture, featuring orthogonal layouts, bordered flower beds, centered ornamental or native plants, and a concrete fountain in the center.
Tiradentes Railway Station is a protected heritage site, listed by IPHAN in 1989, and is part of the São João del-Rei Railway Complex.
The Architecture
“Tiradentes Station is a rural station, removed from the architectural context of the city's eighteenth-century Historic Center. It is much simpler than São João del-Rei's, simpler than Prados'. It is more akin to Ibituruna's, part of this set of small stations in the countryside.
The train is in music, in painting, in samba, it's in all artistic expressions! It is very important for architecture. The railway brought eclectic architecture here, and it imposes itself in a very elegant way. We have beautiful eclectic buildings in the region, influenced by railway architecture. It's a very complex, very rich cultural universe!”
Luiz Antonio da Cruz, teacher and researcher, resident of Tiradentes.
“This railway memory deeply moves me because everything was so beautifully designed, with its own architecture, scale, and proportions, all part of a much larger project. Thus, it embodies aesthetics and spatial dimensions that we no longer see today.”
Maria José Boaventura, visual artist, illustrator and author, art teacher and resident of Tiradentes.
Estação Tiradentes vista de frente. É possível ver os lambrequins que acompanhavam o telhado da Estação. Autor desconhecido, 1920. Acervo Hugo Caramuru
Estação Tiradentes e Locomotiva 42. Mário Arruda, 1984. Acervo pessoal.
