Export, however, is by no means the one source of traffic on the Argentine railways. Transport of goods for home consumption is chiefly a question of a large part of the wheat crop. Building materials also--bricks, lime and stone--are an important item on the various lines which link Buenos Aires with the Sierra de Cordoba and the Sierra de Tandil. In 1913 the Southern line carried 1,134,000 tons of minerals, including 997,000 tons of stone and 101,000 tons of lime from the Sierra de Tandil and 34,000 tons of salt from the salt-mines of Lavalle, between Bahia Blanca and the Colorado. In the same year, the Pacific, Central Argentine, Central Cordoba and State railway carried 880,000 tons of minerals (half being lime) from the Sierra de Cordoba.[117] All the timber carried on the lines of northern Argentina, except the _quebracho_ from the banks of the Parana, is for home use: sleepers, fence-posts, firewood and charcoal are the chief items on most of the lines in the scrub. The war has checked railway construction and reduced the use of sleepers, but it has also deprived Argentina of combustible minerals and increased the transport of firewood. Even on railways like the Pacific and Central Argentine, which have very few of their lines on the scrub, the tonnage of wood carried is 6 per cent. of the whole (average for 1913, 1914 and 1916), and the proportion rises to 30 per cent. of the total tonnage on the Central Cordoba. For several companies the sugars of Tucuman and the wines of Mendoza are an important element of their receipts, not so much on account of the tonnage as the high cost of freightage and the great distance to the centres of consumption in the Pampean region. The carriage of wine and casks brings the Pacific 38.3 per cent. of its receipts (1913-14-16). The transport of sugar on the Central Argentine in a normal year amounts to 5 per cent. of its receipts. On the Central Cordoba the tonnage of sugar-cane and sugar carried amounted in 1914, a year of exceptional harvest, to 42 per cent. of the total tonnage, and was still 20 per cent. in 1916, a year of very poor crop. The supplying of meat to the market of Buenos Aires and the Pampean area, with its dense population, means a good deal of long-distance traffic in cattle; the refrigerators taking the better cattle of the adjoining region for the foreign market, and the slaughter houses of Buenos Aires being forced to content themselves with inferior beasts reared in the provinces and the adjoining districts. [117] The transport of mineral stuff, apart from salt, has been greatly reduced by the war. In 1916 it was only 637,000 tons for the Southern and 157,000 tons for the whole of the lines of the Central Argentine, Pacific, Central Cordoba, and State.