The one in Madrid is one of the most interesting subways in Europe and it is not even due to the work of coverage of your ticket vending machines not even because I’m going to remove drivers from L6. Nor for their pushersits controversial solution to minimize overcrowding. Since Alfonso At 294 kilometers long and with 302 stations, it is the ninth largest in the world.
And in those more than 300 stations it hides historical particularities, such as the ghost station of Chamberí, converted into an air raid shelter during the Spanish Civil War and which remains intact and open to the public in the Platform 0. It’s not the only thing that hasn’t changed: The subway continues to circulate on the left. As a curiosity, some subway escalators are also arranged in that direction.
A fairly common question if you are used to taking the metro in other cities, such as Barcelona or Paris, is the direction of the system’s circulation: in Madrid, the metro runs on the left, as does the London metro. That nod to Britishness is not accidental.
When the Spanish civil engineers Miguel Otamendi, Carlos Mendoza and Antonio González Echarte were in charge of the design of the Madrid Metro, They were inspired by the London Undergroundadopting The Tube’s signaling and circulation standards.
The metro network came before the highway code
And it makes sense: at that time London was the world benchmark for suburban railways and, furthermore, there was no state traffic regulation that required driving on the right. Thus, for example in Madrid people drove on the left while in Barcelona they drove on the right. A side of the mayor of Madrid in 1924 officially decreed that they would drive on the right.
However, a decade later the first highway code state. It doesn’t matter: the Madrid Metro had already been operational for years.
The one of why in the UK we drive on the left It is an issue that has a lot of crumbs, but in short the historical reasons are two: war and comfort. Assuming that most people are right-handed, driving on the left was the best in case of having to fight an attacker that you came across head-on. You had a better angle of maneuver and your right hand was between you and the enemy.
On the other hand, mounting and dismounting from a horse is also easier if you are right-handed and also safer, lowering yourself into the ditch. Likewise, when driving, accidental whipping of pedestrians was also avoided. Was Napoleon who changed this dynamic in the rest of Europe.
Geographically and culturally, it would be logical to think that the Madrid Metro would have changed its orientation to align itself with the bulk of the old continent and current standards, but it did not happen. In addition, Madrid’s light metro lines do circulate on the right following the modern road system.
Despite the adoption of the state traffic code that required driving on the left, the Madrid metro never changed direction. The Madrid Metro Network was and is independent of the state’s railway network, so in the 1930s they determined that it would continue to circulate on the left to avoid exorbitant cost which would mean in infrastructure and logistics the change of the installed signage, the reversal of the direction of travel of the trains and the pointers on the tracks and even how some stations were configured.
Cover | Photo of Martti Salmi in Unsplash
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