Abstract
This study addresses how the rail transport system was organised in the long term and the main vicissitudes that it went through in its more than 170 years of continued existence, from 1848 to 2020. The main railway companies responsible for the economic exploitation of the railway network in this period have been the Compañía de los Ferrocarriles del Norte de España (Norte), la Compañía de los Ferrocarriles de Madrid a Zaragoza y Alicante (MZA), for the period of construction and private use of the network, and RENFE, a public company created in 1941, an acronym for the Spanish National Rail Network and which on 1 January 2005 divided the operations executed until then between Adif (Railway Infrastructure Manager) and Renfe operadora.
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Notes
- 1.
Decree of 7 November 1868 (Madrid Gazette issue 313 of 8 November 1868, 1–2).
- 2.
Included are normal gauge and narrow gauge, private and public ownership, and new constructions.
- 3.
Complemented by ten services not related directly to operations (technical secretariat, legal advice service, stockpiling and warehousing, fuels, general accounting , complaints and enquiries, transport coordination, general expenditure, commissary and staff and social assistance).
- 4.
The report of the World Bank concluded that urgent changes to Renfe’s organisation were required in order to solve its three main problems: the existence of a plethora of administrative bodies within Renfe itself, which divested responsibility and paralysed the controlling authority; constant State intervention in the details of the railway administration system; and the fact that Renfe lacked the power to take certain key decisions.
- 5.
In other words, the bonds issued between 1946 and 1957, foreign loans prior to 1964, loans from the IBRD and other foreign loans taken out since 1964.
- 6.
It was ADIF which inherited the brand of Renfe . This decision involved the most complex business change the railways had witnessed since nationalisation in 1941. In spite of this and despite that fact that it had to be applied with a change in government in between, it was conducted in exemplary fashion since the service provided did not suffer in any way.
- 7.
Narrow-gauge public railways, which had been operated since 1965 by FEVE (Decree-Law 11/1965 of 23 September) were closed down and became part of ADIF and Renfe-Operator by virtue of the Royal Decree of 20 July 2012.
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Muñoz Rubio, M., Ortúñez Goicolea, P.P. (2021). The Railway Sector in Spain in the Long Term. In: Vázquez-Fariñas, M., Ortúñez-Goicolea, P.P., Castro-Valdivia, M. (eds) Companies and Entrepreneurs in the History of Spain. Palgrave Studies in Economic History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61318-1_10
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