History of Desierto-Barakaldo train station

The Bilbao - Barakaldo - Portugalete - Santurtzi line was designed by Charles Vignoles in 1858 to lengthen the Bilbao-Tudela railway and connect it with Abra, whose dock was slated to have a large outer harbour built on it.

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A bit of history

  • The Bilbao - Barakaldo - Portugalete - Santurtzi line was designed by Charles Vignoles in 1858 to lengthen the Bilbao-Tudela railway and connect it with Abra, whose dock was slated to have a large outer harbour built on it. With this initiative temporarily halted due to economic problems and the Carlist War, in 1884, a new contract was awarded and work began under Pablo de Alzola, an engineer and shareholder of the company. The section between Bilbao and Portugalete was inaugurated in 1888, and was opened definitively in December 1889 with the inauguration of the station that had been built on the La Naja jetty, next to the Arenal bridge in Bilbao. Unlike the majority of railways in the Basque train network of the time, which favoured the metre gauge (narrow gauge), the Bilbao-Portugalete line chose to use a width of six Castilian feet (1,672 millimetres).

  • The Desierto-Barakaldo station is one of the few original components left of the original line, which is why it was declared a monument in 2008.

  • It was designed by Bilbao engineer Pablo de Alzola and today it maintains practically all the components of its original design: as a second-class station (those located in neighbourhoods and not in the central core of the city), it is characterised by a central section covered with a double-slope roof between two lower side wings.

  • This line had four goals: to offer a metropolitan passenger train, reach Abra and the outer harbour, connect the Bizkaia Provincial Council railway (best known as the Triano), and provide service to all the industries that arose at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century on the left bank of the Nervión. Therefore, this historic railway was a key to the social and industrial development of Bizkaia as the backbone of the development of the left bank and the outer harbour.

  • In the first period of this railway’s operations, it acquired a great deal of passenger traffic. Its design with many stations, a platform height at car level (the first in Spain), the characteristics of the cars and normal circulation of more than 100 trains per day over the course of 18 hours demonstrate as much. It had to deal with the competition of the first electric tram in Spain (1898) with a route nearly parallel to the train from Bilbao to Santurtzi.

  • The flow of goods, therefore, was lower than passengers until 1896, when the definitive connection with the Bilbao-Tudela line was made with the Cantalojas to Olabeaga branch. After that, this line was key to reaching some of the most important companies of Bizkaia, like Altos Hornos de Vizcaya, Talleres de Zorroza, Astilleros del Nervión, SEC Naval and Astilleros Euskalduna.

  • In 1926 the section to Santurtzi was finished thanks to the collaboration of the Port Works Board. But refurbishment par excellence was the electrification of this line, inaugurated on 4 August 1933. The new powering allowed trains to come more frequently, between every 7 and 15 minutes at peak times on working days.