It is Saturday, October 28, 1848, and the first bars of the Artillery Corps' music slide among veritable floods of people, very close to Barceloneta, the first stop on the Barcelona-Mataró line. Astonishment. Enthusiasm. It is progress, it is the first train in mainland Spain, ladies and gentlemen, that departs from what seems like a humble stop.
Our first line was the section to Bejucal from Havana-Güines, with which thousands of Cubans and Spaniards squeezed the transportation and colonial trade of sugar from 1837, while other thousands of Spaniards were sunk by clubs on the peninsula during the First Carlist War. But let's put aside our differences on a day like this!
It is autumn 1848, and from now on they will have breakfast, as I told you, in Barcelona and will have an aperitif in Mataró, that giant of textile production, after traveling 30 kilometers along the sea in half an hour without stops, and in an hour if your train stops at its initial seven stations, which will soon be eight. As Luis Ubalde recalls in The Barcelona suburban railway (Efadós, 2020), “the train on the opening day carried 24 cars with a total capacity of 900 passengers.”
For many, the long journeys of five to six hours by stagecoach are over, although the owners of the stagecoaches have tried, or so it is said, to sabotage the works to delay the inevitable during the construction of tracks and platforms, which was completed, very late. his regret, in just four years.
Something unprecedented, gentlemen; Hold on to your hats and moderate, if you can, the ladies' enthusiasm, because this is moving. And how it moves! Don't forget to offer them your scented handkerchiefs at stations saturated with smoke and coal. It is the unfortunate price of civilization, friends and neighbors, a necessary price. Because now they will travel at almost 50 kilometers per hour on average, and in the first year alone there will be up to five unfortunate accidents.
It is possible that they did not see the tracks, which were at ground level so that the horse carts would not trip, and, furthermore, they were not accompanied by hundreds of traditional ballast stones. Then there is calculating the unprecedented speed at which an object is approaching that, painted bright green and red, spits fire and smoke and whistles furiously at the edge of the beaches where fishermen land and the population goes for a walk. These are the dangers of civilization!
Speed and the future, I'm afraid, never ask permission. And even less when they rush on railway tracks and very advanced locomotives, four at first, designed thanks to the engineer Mr. Wright and the chief engineer Mr. Locke, member of the English House of Commons and promoter of railway projects in half of Europe, to the Mackenzie construction company
Biada and Roca had mobilized the Spanish and British shareholders and sustained the enthusiasm of the Catalan bourgeoisie for that great day of 1848 to arrive, which the shareholders would have wanted to be October 10, to coincide the inauguration with the queen's birthday. Spanish Isabel II.
Anyway, the day finally arrived, and the elites of Barcelona gathered at the inauguration and prepared to board, of course, in first class, among the six wooden seats per car upholstered with very red velvet. “Red velvet”, as the English say. The second-class seats, eight per car, will be upholstered in green corduroy; In the third class – ten –, the seats will not be upholstered, and we are told that over time some will be allowed to travel standing.
First class seats cost twelve reales, second class nine and third class six. Although it may surprise, special rates for dogs, baggage check-in (measured in arrobas) and access control were available to customers.
Regarding the effectiveness of access control, chroniclers say that there were hundreds of curious people at the inauguration of the line and that some of them, taking advantage of the mass chaos of that October morning in Mataró, boarded the train back to Barcelona without anyone invited them. They thought they would go unnoticed if they sneaked into the last car, which probably didn't have anyone in it. They knew that until Sunday, that is, the next day, the general public would not be able to travel, but they did not want to wait...
And that's how the station chief discovered them and ordered the car to be unhitched without its occupants realizing. The stowaways had to be shocked to see how the procession happily walked away with its smoking locomotive, while they were left stranded on the platform in front of everyone. It had been disappointing, yes, but hadn't they gotten on the train, and for free, while their friends and neighbors just watched and queued at the ticket offices?
The flow of music continues very close to Barceloneta and the streams of people at the inauguration continue, led by those who the chroniclers describe as "gentlemen directors of the company", gentlemen shareholders of the train, generals, politicians, magistrates, diplomats and representatives of scientific and industrial corporations, to whom must be added, of course, "several distinguished people", whom the journalists who write the chronicles do not name because they do not know who they are, and they do not want to risk forgetting or stopping flattering...
No one will forget or fail to praise among the illustrious delegation the prelate of the diocese of Barcelona, Don Gil Esteve, who blessed the railway line in three different places: at the stop near Barceloneta, which later will be much more than that, at the of Masnou, as the halfway point of the path, and in Mataró.
And Don Gil, a little later, but not much later, because the train is very fast, will sing in the Mataró temple “a solemn Te Deum”, sung by the music chapel and the artists of the Mataró lyrical company. Because on that improbable October 28, there was no choice between the Church and progress. Whatever unites the train, some of those first travelers were able to entrust themselves as they crossed the gloomy Montgat tunnel, please let us men not separate it!
In the last ten years we had suffered the final blows of the first Carlist war, the civil uprising in Barcelona and the uprising of General Narváez, which later inaugurated a decade of relative stability (more by Spanish than European standards).
In any case, in 1847, and in the midst of the penultimate economic crisis, some of the investors in the Barcelona-Mataró line did not contribute the capital that they had promised in exchange for the shares..., and the British shareholders threatened to demand their pounds and leave slamming the door. Miquel Biada pacified the situation and instilled confidence, dedicating an additional and considerable portion of his fortune to the project.
The message was clear: I believe so much in my project that I am willing to border on ruin. And there are still people unable to pay what they promised until the courts demand it? Where is the value of the word given by the bourgeoisie? And many bourgeois, perhaps scared and, of course, impoverished by the crisis, discreetly put in the money.
The economic historian Pere Pascual Domènech said in The Paths of the Industrial Era (UB, 1999) that those turbulences jeopardized a project that was already struggling with the difficulties of importing machinery and designs, and even workers, from abroad. Everything except what was necessary to build the small stations, which, at first, were only stops.
Furthermore, British contractors, despite having been building and deploying trains since their famous Manchester-Liverpool line in 1830 and having grown up on some very stormy islands punished by the voracity of the Atlantic and the North Sea, were not able to suspect the how the blows of the hot Mediterranean and the torrential rains of northern Spain would damage wooden infrastructure.
This increased the maintenance costs of the Barcelona-Mataró line for years. Without going any further, in September 1850, a strong storm caused the destruction of the bridge over the Besòs, and the passengers had no choice but to cross the river on foot using a lever.
Pascual Domènech also highlighted another great challenge: the notable resistance of the owners of the land that the railway had to cross. It is no coincidence that, on many occasions, the original route was corrected so that it passed next to the beaches, because these were public land, they did not have to be expropriated and it was enough to persuade the administrations.
The problem was clearly raised by the Badalona city council: "The railway is placed at a different point than the one designated in the original plans... to save on compensation." In these circumstances, the council continued, “the fishermen, who form a very considerable part of the population, will have nowhere to put their boats or where to save themselves on days of high tide or storm.”
All of this led to attempts to minimize the impact on fishermen with new infrastructure and plans, but, despite this, part of the rural discontent continued, and the Army ended up guarding the works. The stagecoach sector was not resigned to the imminent existence of the train.
Pilar García, director of the Catalan Railway Museum, located in Vilanova i la Geltrú, explains that passengers also had their own complaints. After all, he ironically, “women and men traveled dangerously together in the darkness of the Montgat tunnel (135 meters), social classes mixed in first class” (how was it possible that it was enough to pay the ticket to share car with a countess and dare to talk to her?) and, García continues, “there was no waiting room for first or second class in the main stations” (did they intend for the workers and the owners of the stations to share cigars and sherry? factories?). Furthermore, she adds, “there was no small amount of concern about the possible nervous diseases that could be contracted while traveling at such speed.”
As Luis Ubalde remembers, the third-class passengers were not at all happy that they could not roll up their windows in the middle of the storm, the cold or the downpour. They were told it was due to lack of budget, but they must have reacted with skepticism when they saw the first-class seats with the windows closed and covered in red velvet. On the other hand, there were also many who complained about tardiness and crowds. And there were, from the beginning, four locomotives and six trains per day in each direction.
Despite all these complaints from passengers who until then had only traveled in horse carts, all the route changes by agricultural owners and the needs of fishermen, all the fights with English shareholders and contractors, the intervention of the Army to guard the infrastructure, of all the institutional crises of Spain in the first half of the 19th century, of all the fears over the nervous illnesses that would be induced by that “tremendous” speed of 50 kilometers per hour, of the romances that They would begin in the dark Montgat tunnel, in the way in which, without a doubt, the fields would catch fire with the pieces of burning coal emitted by the locomotives... Despite all that, the Barcelona-Mataró line became a reality.
And there is something else: its extraordinary popularity led, in a very short time, to the cars going from 25 to more than 30, to the passenger seats doubling to 1,900 and to the fact that, in just the first twelve months of operation , almost 700,000 people traveled.
Three decades later, in 1877, one of the line's four locomotives was displayed on a pedestal in front of the University of Barcelona on the occasion of the Catalan Exhibition, coinciding with a visit by King Alfonso XII. Roca and Biada's dream had become a legend.
