📗 Libro en catalán L ARRENCADA DEL FERROCARRIL A BARCELONA 1800-1850

With a narrative, almost detective style, Ferran Armengol, addresses the origin of railways in Barcelona, based on many documentary sources and placing them in the political, social and economic circumstances of the first half of the 20th century.

The inauguration of the Mataró line in 1848 marked Barcelona’s entry into the railway era and, by extension, that of the whole Iberian Peninsula. However, as early as 1800, trials had already been carried out on La Rambla using a system of transport on rails known as the “dry canal”, conceived by the Barcelona scientist Francesc Salvà i Campillo as an alternative to navigation canals.
Salvà’s dry canal and the Mataró “railway” are, therefore, two of the landmarks that frame the start of the railways in Barcelona, while showing the contrasts the city experienced while Europe and America were going through the transport revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries. Salvà’s experiment preceded by four decade the debate over replacing navigation canals with railways.
The Barcelona-Mataró railway, on the other hand, was built with technology and capital imported from England and arrived when nearly all the countries in Western Europe had started up their first railway lines. Undoubtedly, this time lag stemmed from the economic and political crisis of the Barcelona of the day, but it is no less certain that these initiatives show a society open to the world, connected with European scientific and intellectual circles and linked with other cities in Europe and America through maritime trade.
All things considered, the fact that Barcelona witnessed an experiment that was a precursor to the railway and the first railway line in the Iberian Peninsula is not pure coincidence.