I don't know where to start - well, I started on the 09:20 from Leon to Gijon, but dropped off at Oviedo and took the local metre gauge to FEVE into Gijon, connection on to Aviles, then to Pravia and finally to San Xoan, arriving there a few minutes after the scheduled 21:41 and just in time to check into my hotel while it was still staffed.
The section from Leon is through wild mountains, a torturous, spectacular and heavily engineered line which, however, takes 2 hours to cover a distance of 140 kms ... and a new line is being worked on to cut that down, with a 25 km base tunnel. Oviedo, Gijon, and a number of other towns cluster on the middle north coast of Spain and have a thriving little local network of both broad gauge and narrow gauge trains ... with just 2 a day headed west to Ferrol and east to Santander and Bilbao.
From Pravia, I took the afternoon train at 15:40 all the way to San Xoan - that's in the 'burbs of Ferrol near to a booked hotel. Six hours as we wound along the coastline from a lovely day to pitch black on arrival. Bays, beaches, towns, estuaries, forests, fields and mountains. Tunnels, viaducts, sharp bends and bridges, and wayside stations and more significant ones all along the way.
The section from Pravia to Ribadeo takes 3 hours and in that half of the journey, there's not a loop that allows two trains to pass in use - this must be one of the longest single line sections anywhere! When we got to Ribadeo, the afternoon train headed east was waiting to go ...! There are a couple of rusted loops that might be serviceable, but they look to me as if they've not been used for years, and many many stations where a single track runs through a site with abandoned platforms to the side. And there are halts - in some sections of the line, the train stopping for a few seconds in the vain hope of a passenger, and in other parts just passing through where no-one waits. They make Shippea Hill look busy.
For a line with so few passengers, the standard of upkeep of the track looks amazingly good, and I don't see how the line can make economic sense with just our 2 coach trains picking up a few people here and there. There were perhaps 30 or 40 people on the train, odd ones getting on and off along the way. A couple of schoolgirls returning home - perhaps for the weekend - from Pravia to one or another of the remote farm clusters served by its own station. A dropout with trousers torn so badly it was embarrassing who got off in the middle of nowhere. A handful of people travelling longer distances.
Even underused single-line backwaters need new signals, it appears.
From Railway Gazette:
Metre-gauge line to be resignalled
23 December 2022
SPAIN: ADIF has awarded Thales a 27-month contract worth €20·8m to supply ASFA Digital ATP▸ to replace telephone block working on the 101 km single track, non-electrified Ortigueira – Ribadeo section of the Oviedo – Ferrol metre gauge line along the north coast.
