Description

Ferrovías S.A.C. runs the Belgrano Norte line, one of the commuter rail services of the Buenos Aires metropolitan area. Its route goes from Retiro to Villa Rosa, crossing the city and the northern suburbs across 23 stations. It is part of Grupo Emepa.

This is a public-service site: whoever opens it is not browsing, they are about to travel. Almost always from a phone, often on the platform and in a hurry. That use drove every decision in the project.

Challenge

The previous site did not support that use. Timetables and fares were published as PDFs, which on a phone mean pinching and dragging to read a single cell. There was no way to announce a delay: when service was disrupted, passengers found out on the platform. And every content change went through a third party, so information arrived late or never.

On top of that came a requirement that is regulatory rather than about design: the complaints book had to be digital and leave a record with a unique case number, because it is audit material for the CNRT.

Solution

We worked for four months in fifteen-day sprints, with a closing meeting per sprint and a shared implementation plan where both teams could see progress and leave comments. The design drew on how European operators solve this — Renfe and Eurail — and was rebuilt from scratch, phone first.

The home page turns on service status: two signals, one per direction of travel, that the communications team changes from the dashboard and that appear on the site instantly, with the detail of the delay and the section affected. Timetables and fares moved from PDF to dynamic tables with a search box, updated by uploading a CSV. The route map stopped being a fixed image and became a map you can navigate station by station.

The whole site is self-managed on WordPress: home-page banners, news, passenger services, safety and the four contact forms. The infrastructure runs on managed Automattic servers with a firewall and monitoring, and we keep it maintained.

• Self-managed service-status signals, one per direction
• Timetables and fares as dynamic tables with search and CSV upload
• Digital complaints book with a unique case number for CNRT audits
• Route on a dynamic map, station by station
• Manage banners, news and passenger-service content
• Managed infrastructure, firewall and maintenance

Impact

The site went live on 24 June 2026. In its first month — fewer days than that in practice — it recorded more than 70,000 unique visits without a single outage.

The real change is who controls the information: the Ferrovías communications team posts a delay, corrects a fare or uploads a new timetable without asking anyone. The site stopped being something updated when possible and became part of daily operations.