We are travelling along one of the greenways with the least railway history in Spain. The railway tracks that linked Santiago with A Coruña are relatively young, but they began to be conceived as far back as 1864.  But concessions and projects were failing year after year. It became known as La Tieira Railway. Interested businessmen came and gone, and they even considered building the track in metric gauge. Finally, the promotion of the Preferential Plan for Urgent Construction Railways, the famous Guadalhorce Plan, and the pressure from naval authorities to improve access to the Ferrol Dockyard, finally led to the start of construction in 1927, as the final section of the Direct Railway Line to Galicia, being officially known as the Zamora, Orense and Coruña Railway.

Like all those Guadalhorce railways, no expense was spared: it was built as a double track, and its designers were not thwarted by Galicia’s rugged terrain, providing it with up to 19 tunnels that add up to 8.5 km of galleries out of the line’s total length of 74 km. But this technical difficulty and the Civil War postponed its implementation until March 1943.  Our greenway makes use of a short section of that line that, in harmony with the construction of the new high-speed network, was taken out of service in 2011 due to the construction of a large bypass, much of it underground.