History
The first railway line in Iberia was built in 1848 between Barcelona and Mataró In 1852 the first narrow gauge line was built; in 1863 a line reached the Portuguese border. By 1864 the Madrid-Irun line had been opened, and the French border reached.
In 1911 the first line to be electrified was the Gergal-Santa Fe line.
In 1941 RENFE was created.
The last steam locomotive was withdrawn in 1975, in 1986 the maximum speed on the railways was raised to 160 km/h, and in 1992 the Madrid-Seville high speed line opened, beginning the process of building a nationwide high speed network.
The current plans of the Spanish government plans to link all the provincial capitals with high speed rail, with a total estimated length of over 9000 km of high-speed railways for 2020.
Read more about this topic: Rail Transport In Spain
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“All things are moral. That soul, which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its inspiration; out there in history we can see its fatal strength.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We may pretend that we’re basically moral people who make mistakes, but the whole of history proves otherwise.”
—Terry Hands (b. 1941)
“We said that the history of mankind depicts man; in the same way one can maintain that the history of science is science itself.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)