Portugal's first train: Lisbon to Carregado, 28 October 1856

At eleven in the morning of 28 October 1856, King Pedro V arrived at Santa Apolónia, on the Lisbon waterfront, with his father and the princes and princesses of the royal family. The Cardinal Patriarch, the Infanta Isabel Maria, the diplomatic corps and a large crowd were already there. The guests were received in a pavilion divided into three richly hung rooms: one for the royal family, one for the cardinal and his clergy, one for the diplomats and the court.1 source

The ceremony began with the locomotives. Each one drew up in turn beside the dais where the cardinal stood, and he sprinkled it with holy water. Two of them were then coupled to a train of 16 carriages, with the royal family in the middle carriage and the royal guard of archers in the first.1 source

The magazine O Panorama said the run to Carregado took half an hour; the Jornal do Comércio said forty minutes. A second train of nine carriages, pulled by a single engine, followed three quarters of an hour later with the company's shareholders and guests. In the villages along the line, people turned out with bands, rockets and triumphal arches.1 source

At Carregado the guests ate standing up in a flag-hung pavilion beside the temporary station. The royal train started back at about half past four. Near Sacavém, on the edge of Lisbon, the tubes of one of its two locomotives burst. The other engine took six carriages, the king's among them, on to Santa Apolónia, then went back for the remaining eight. The return took two hours, and the rest of the guests were back in Lisbon by ten at night.1 source

The paper, which counted 14 carriages on the royal train rather than 16, blamed engines that were old and worn out, and a company that had never set up a repair workshop. Four new locomotives from an English maker were expected the following month. The track itself, it added, was sound, and the public trips advertised for that day had run without incident.1 source

England's Liverpool and Manchester Railway had opened in 1830. Portugal took another 26 years, and not for lack of plans. On 19 April 1845 the government signed a contract with the Companhia das Obras Públicas de Portugal that included a railway from Lisbon to the Spanish border, but the company sank with the political upheavals of 1846.2 sources

The minister most associated with that policy was António Maria de Fontes Pereira de Melo, then in charge of finance. The railway tender of 1852 was drawn up under his inspiration, and on 30 August 1852 a new Ministry of Public Works, Commerce and Industry was created. Historians call his programme of roads, railways and telegraph lines, paid for largely with loans raised abroad, fontismo.3 sources

The first target was Spain, not Porto. The planners wanted a line from Lisbon to the border near Badajoz, to join the Spanish network and make Lisbon a gateway between Europe and the Atlantic. That is why the first line was called the Caminho de Ferro de Leste, the Eastern Railway. Proposals to link Porto with Vigo were turned down because they were thought to threaten Lisbon's future as Europe's port for the Americas and Africa.2 sources

The first concrete offer came from Hardy Hislop. On 18 July 1851 a commission that included Almeida Garrett was named to study his proposal for a line from Lisbon to the border near Badajoz. It turned the proposal down, but on 20 October 1851 it drew up the terms for a public tender. The tender, for the first stretch from Lisbon to Santarém, opened on 6 May 1852 under a decree signed by Rodrigo da Fonseca Magalhães and Fontes, and closed on 31 July.2 sources

Three bids arrived, one of them from the British contractor Morton Peto. Two were set aside because they did not meet the conditions. The concession went to the third, from Hislop on behalf of the Companhia Central e Peninsular dos Caminhos de Ferro em Portugal, with a state guarantee of interest on the capital spent.2 sources

Its finances were weak from the start. The historian Magda Pinheiro found that a list of London shareholders presented in March 1853 was fictitious, and that the government agreed that month to take a third of the capital itself; 5,109 shares were never taken up. The contractors, Shaw & Waring of London, were among the main shareholders, and the company did not inspect the work they handed over. Only the state's engineers did.1 source

The definitive contract was signed on 11 May 1853 and approved by law on 18 August, and work began on 17 September. The company's engineer, Thomas Rumball, had planned a terminus inland at Largo do Intendente, with a branch down to the Tagus at Xabregas. João Crisóstomo de Abreu e Sousa and Carlos Lobo d'Ávila objected that this kept the line away from the river, and the government moved the terminus at the Cais dos Soldados, an old artillery barracks on the waterfront.2 sources

Harcourt White, another engineer working for Hislop, warned that the site was too cramped, and later experience proved him right. The first station was set up in the former convent of Santa Apolónia nearby, a state building that had to be adapted for the purpose.2 sources

In early September 1855, after a dispute over an unpaid monthly bill, Shaw & Waring stopped work. Pinheiro dates the stoppage to 3 September; the Gazeta dos Caminhos de Ferro gives 5 September. The state took over the works and in February 1856 handed them to Watier, an engineer of the French bank Crédit Mobilier, assisted by Portuguese engineers.2 sources

Fontes travelled to London and Paris to settle with the contractors and the holders of Portuguese debt, and to interest the Crédit Mobilier in building a whole network. His government fell before the plan cleared the upper house. Under the Duke of Loulé's government that followed, the young king took a close hand. Pedro V distrusted French capital and used his ties with the British royal family to look for British investors instead.1 source

The Central Peninsular ran the 36 kilometres it had opened, but it never recovered. It dissolved in May 1857, and on 9 July the state took over the line after rescinding the contract. Writing in 1988, the historian António Lopes Vieira called the affair the Central Peninsular swindle. The few Portuguese who might have put money into railways, he wrote, were still recovering from it when French promoters arrived with proposals of their own.3 sources

Public trains began within a day or two of the ceremony. Until 22 March 1857 the company ran two trains each way, then three, carrying passengers and their baggage only. Fares were charged by the kilometre and quoted in francs. Under the general tariff the state brought in for 1859, first class cost 0.088 francs a kilometre.1 source

Traffic averaged about 900 passengers a day. In the first year of operation, from November 1856 to October 1857, the line, extended to Virtudes in July 1857, carried 314,276 people, about four in five of them in third class. It still lost money: costs exceeded receipts in each of the first three years.1 source

João Crisóstomo de Abreu e Sousa, the engineer who ran the line for the state, blamed awkward termini, a shortage of rolling stock and costly repairs. A later engineer, Pedro Inácio Lopes, put the route first. The line ran beside the Tagus, where river boats and the Azambuja canal carried goods cheaply, and no roads brought traffic to the stations from the interior. Goods trains did not start until the line reached Virtudes, about 50 kilometres from Lisbon, in 1857.1 source

The state pushed the line on in short stretches: to Virtudes on 31 July 1857, Ponte de Santana in April 1858 and Ponte de Asseca, about 60 kilometres from Lisbon, in June 1858. Pinheiro's verdict is that it had taken six years to build 60 kilometres.2 sources

In 1857 the government signed a contract with Morton Peto to build the line to Porto, but that year's financial crisis stopped him forming a company, and the contract was rescinded on 6 June 1859. On 30 July 1859 the government turned to the Spanish financier José de Salamanca. He set up the Companhia Real dos Caminhos de Ferro Portugueses, formally constituted on 11 May 1860 and backed mainly by French capital.2 sources

Then the work went fast. In about four years Salamanca's men opened another 426 kilometres: to Santarém on 1 July 1861, to Abrantes on 7 November 1862 and to the Spanish border near Badajoz on 24 September 1863. The Norte line left the Leste at Entroncamento, and on 7 July 1864 the last gap, between Soure and Taveiro near Coimbra, was closed. Lisbon was now linked by rail to Vila Nova de Gaia, across the Douro from Porto.2 sources

Getting across the Douro took 13 more years. The site of the Porto station and the line of the crossing were argued over in parliament, and the Companhia Real, hit by the financial crisis of 1868, had little money. Meanwhile the line stopped at Gaia, on the south bank, cut off from Porto and from the state lines being built north of the river.2 sources

In 1875 the Companhia Real gave the bridge to the firm of Gustave Eiffel, which designed it with Théophile Seyrig. Its iron arch spanned 160 metres, the largest iron arch in the world when it was finished. King Luís and Queen Maria Pia, after whom it was named, inaugurated it on 4 November 1877, and the last stretch into Porto opened the next day.3 sources

Construction came in bursts. Magda Pinheiro describes a slow start, a boom from 1861 to 1865, little building until the mid-1870s, a deep but brief slump in the crisis of 1882 and a new expansion after 1884. By 1879 half the lines in service had been built by the state, and in 1891, with the public finances in crisis, state building stopped too.2 sources

Writing in 1958, the railway engineer Frederico de Quadros Abragão tallied the growth: 36 kilometres in 1856, 693.5 in 1864, 812 in 1874, 1,516 in 1884, 2,352 in 1894, 2,753 in 1907 and 3,135 in 1915. Almost everything on those lines, from the rails to the locomotives, wagons and carriages, was imported.2 sources

Modern figures come from a different source and are not directly comparable. According to INE, the national statistics office, whose series PORDATA publishes from 1968, the length of line in operation in mainland Portugal held at about 3,600 kilometres until the late 1980s. It then fell sharply, from 3,607 kilometres in 1988 to 3,061 in 1989, and dropped again from 2,794 in 2011 to 2,541 in 2012.1 source

In 2025 trains ran on 2,525 of the 3,622 kilometres of line counted by INE; the rest was out of use. Infraestruturas de Portugal (IP), the state company that manages the track, counts 1,792 kilometres of electrified line and 546 stations and halts in service.2 sources

Historians have asked whom the lines were for. The geographer Maria Fernanda Alegria argued in 1988 that they were built mainly to connect Portugal with Europe and its foreign trade, with too many international links and too few branches into the interior. She found that regions the railway had crossed for years still used it little for trade with the rest of the country until near the end of the century.1 source

For the centenary in 1956, CP, the company that by then ran most of the network, wanted to switch on electric trains on 28 October itself. The rolling stock was not ready, so CP marked the day with an exhibition at the Sociedade Nacional de Belas Artes, the post office issued commemorative stamps, and CP planned a train to Carregado with a parade of old and new stock for the day electric services began. Electrification at 25,000 volts began with the Sintra line and the Norte as far as Entroncamento.2 sources

The 1856 line is now the southern end of the Linha do Norte, Portugal's main railway. According to IP, almost half of all passenger trains in the country and more than 90 per cent of freight trains use it for at least part of their journey. Mixing that traffic has caused capacity problems for years, and IP says the line's capacity and scope for higher speeds are practically exhausted.2 sources

IP's answer is a new high-speed line meant to cut the Lisbon to Porto journey to about 1 hour 15 minutes. The concession for the first section, from Porto to Oiã, south of Aveiro, was signed on 29 July 2025, with construction due to start in the third quarter of 2026 and end in 2030. A second phase, from Soure to Carregado, is due in 2033.2 sources

The last stretch, from Carregado into Lisbon, would save only about five minutes and will be built later. Until then, high-speed trains will run into the capital on the 1856 route, which is to be widened to four tracks between Alverca and Azambuja. The new line will also use the Iberian gauge, on sleepers designed to allow a later change to the European width.1 source