The pioneers of Catalan trains: who paid for them?

The railway disaster we are experiencing has its roots in the 19th century. The lack of public investment has deep roots. In the second half of the 1800s, the financing, which was not very profitable, was provided by Catalan businessmen without support from the Madrid government, from which they only obtained the concession. The Girona family played a prominent role, being the largest investors in the Industrial Revolution in Catalonia and, unlike other famous families, they did not amass their initial capital in the Antilles through slavery. But small businessmen also participated in railway investment, as was the case with the Sant Feliu de Guíxols railway in Girona, inaugurated in 1892 thanks to the impetus of cork manufacturers, led by Joan Cases and Arxer, and with shares held by many villagers. This line also received no state support.

As is well known, the first section to enter service was the Barcelona-Mataró line. Miquel Biada, who had witnessed the launch of the railway in Cuba (1837: from Havana to Güines), was its driving force. Capital came from Josep M. Roca, a financier based in London: he mobilized English and Catalan shareholders. There was also no financial support from the State, which was more interested in promoting the Madrid-Aranjuez line, in which the Minister of Finance was an investor. The London Stock Exchange crash of 1847 jeopardized the project, but it went ahead. The inauguration took place in October 1848, Biada having died a few months earlier at the age of 59.

In 1850, Manuel Girona, founder of the Bank of Barcelona (a great patron of the Liceu opera house and Barcelona Cathedral, and the builder of the University of Barcelona's main building), secured the financing for the line that, from 1854, connected Barcelona with Granollers, with the aim of extending it to Ripoll and Sant Joan. Five years earlier, it had reached Vic (incidentally, the first design for this line was done by the engineer Ildefons Cerdà, the creator of Barcelona's Eixample district). The aim was to take advantage of the coal from Ogassa, which, however, never met the desired quality. But Manuel Girona's great undertaking was the Barcelona-Zaragoza line via Lleida (the Girona family was originally from Tàrrega: don't miss the documentary). The Gerona family (on La 2 Cat), which was built between 1852 and 1961. "I was called crazy," he explained years later. It was more than 300 kilometers long at a cost of 200,000 pesetas per kilometer, all-inclusive. It also received no state funding, only permission to hire prisoners at full pay with the added benefit of reducing their sentences (it was hard and dangerous work). Both on this macro-project and on the Urgell Canal (where prisoners also worked), the Girona family lost a lot of money. But in the long run, they proved to be key infrastructure for the country. The Barcelona terminus of that line is the current Estació del Nord (North Station), now a municipal sports center and bus station.

By 1865, 780 km of track had already been built in Catalonia, and by 1905 the network can be considered complete: it linked the four Catalan provincial capitals and connected with Valencia and Zaragoza, also reaching the border at Portbou. Today, Catalonia has 1,386 km of track (45% double track) distributed among the Adif conventional network, high-speed rail, the Ferrocarrils de la Generalitat (Catalan Government Railways), the Barcelona metropolitan area metro (141 km), the tram (29 km), and the rack railways of Núria and Montserrat. In the 19th century, throughout Spain, a great deal of public money flowed into lines that proved underutilized—as has happened again in recent decades with high-speed rail—especially in western Spain and southern Andalusia. It was one of the causes of the collapse of the Spanish Treasury in the years following 1865 (the Spanish financial system had already collapsed before then). All of this meant that the quality of the railway service, from its very beginnings, was far from adequate. Let everyone draw their own conclusions.