Mining railways, devoid of the glamour of passenger railways, tend to have a more than discreet existence. They do not make the news and produce hardly any photos or testimonies, apart from their secluded routes in the mountains. This is the case of the mining railway that transported tons of iron from the Arditurri pitheads to the port of Pasajes. It had a smaller gauge than conventional railways: 75 cm. These narrow rails make it easier for the routes to run through mountain ravines, decreasing construction expenses at the cost of reducing speed, which, obviously, was not something required to transport the iron from the mine to the ship. In any case, this gauge is certainly peculiar, since the most common one on mining tracks was 60 cm, as is the case, for example, of the neighbouring Artikutza railway.

This line was proposed as the best way to bring iron ore from the Arditurri mines, located on the west side of the Aia crags, to the port of Pasajes. The route featured a gentle descent, ideal for a mining train whose loaded wagons descended almost solely by gravity, and then went back up from the port to the crags either empty or transporting material for the mine. These mines have a long history, dating from Roman times. Then, at the beginning of the 20th century, the Chavarri family of Basque magnates acquired them and looked for the best way to optimize their exploitation. To that end, they laid down this railway, which opened in 1901 solely as a mining transport route. The tracks went down to the port and there they had a cantilever loading dock that enabled the mining wagons to be unloaded straight into the hold of the ships, although they could also be unloaded onto the Compañía del Norte’s broad-gauge trains in the docks of this Gipuzkoan anchorage. Although the mines closed permanently in the mid-1980s, the trains stopped running through these meadows in 1965, when the new A-8 motorway blocked the route and the modest mining traffic at that time probably did not justify a new route to overcome this difficulty.