Plans for a railway were first conceived in
1829 due to the need to transport growing quantities of wine to the seaports by
better means than oxcarts. This was the dawn of the railway era, and it would
have been the first line in Spain, yet nothing came of the plans, due mainly to
difficulty in raising money. It would be 1854 before a line was constructed
between Jerez and El Portal on the river Guadalete, where butts of wine used to
be loaded onto boats and taken to El Puerto de Santa María for onward shipment,
mostly to Britain. That same year the line was extended to El Puerto. These were the
first railway lines in Andalucía.
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| The train at bodegas Manuel Guerrero (foto:Jose Luis Jimenez) |
The line was further extended to the Trocadero
quayside at Puerto Real in 1856. Now one could travel from Jerez to Cádiz in
little more than an hour via El Portal and El Puerto de Santa María to El
Trocadero, from where a boat would whisk one across the bay to the capital.
Stations were pretty primitive in those days, and the fairly crude structure
which was Jerez station became a goods depot in 1870 when a better passenger
station was built. The station of today was designed by the famous architect
Aníbal González, who designed the Gallo Azul and the Exposición Iberoamericana
in Sevilla in 1929. The station was completed in the early 1930s and is
opposite the now abandoned offices of Díez Hermanos.
Butts of Sherry, and indeed other goods, still
needed to be transported to or from the station by cart on roads in poor
condition, so a plan was drawn up for an urban railway system. The council readily
gave permission and work was well underway by April 1870. It is thought to be
the first urban railway in Spain, and Jerezanos used to joke that people in
Madrid still had to use carts. There were three locomotives which, along with
their wagons needed to be on a smaller scale than normal trains to negotiate
narrow streets, but they had the same gauge, allowing the wagons to be linked
to the mainline train at the station. The whistle of the little train
(maquinilla) could be heard for miles and clouds of smoke followed it
everywhere, but it made things a great deal more efficient, even at a speed
limited to 10 kph.
In those days there were more bodegas than now,
and many proprietors of the larger ones paid for branch lines to go directly
into them. Many of these were inevitably dead ends, but that was no problem;
wagons could be left there, loaded at the bodega’s convenience, and collected
later. Bodegas which had no branch lines had to load or unload quickly to avoid
congesting the street.
By the 1960s the maquinilla was becoming
obsolete as there were better roads and more convenient road transport in the
form of trucks which could go anywhere. The trenecito (as it was also known)
was taken out of service and scrapped in 1969, after 99 years of service, and
is now the focus of much nostalgia.
