Madrid Metro - Rolling Stock

Rolling Stock

Traditionally, the trains operating in the Madrid Metro have been built and supplied by the Spanish company Construcciones y Auxiliar de Ferrocarriles (CAF). This was particularly true under Francisco Franco's dictatorship, due to the politic of autarchy his administration initially pursued. However, in recent years the Italian Ansaldobreda has also provided trains for the wide-profile lines.

Every rolling unit in the Madrid Metro has a unique ID that singles it out in the whole network. Those IDs are grouped by the rolling unit model (the "series") and thus is used to categorize the trains, as they bear no user-visible statement of the model specified by the manufacturer. An ID is made up of:

• A letter indicating the type of rolling unit: M for a car with both engines and driver's cabin (Spanish Motor), R for an engineless car, with or without drivers cabin (Spanish Remolque) and S for a cabinless car with engines (Spanish motor Sin cabina).
• A dash separating the two components
• A three or four digit number indicating the unit's series and the position within it. Usually, the series is indicated by the thousands and hundreds (i.e. 5281 indicates a series 5000, subseries 200 train).