This railway route was designed to connect the towns of Linares in Jaén and Utiel in Valencia. That is why, although it is commonly known as the Baeza-Utiel Railway, it would be accurate to call it the Linares-Baeza – Utiel line. This railway was meant to form part of a much longer itinerary that would continue northwards, passing through Teruel, Lleida, and connecting with the French network in Saint Girons. Of all this route, only the section from Lleida to Pobla de Segur came into service. The rest was left as sections of levelled ground. In this sector from Linares to Albacete, rails were even laid throughout the Albacete section. A triple paradox came to spoil the implementation of this railway: : it arose very late, when the road was beginning to take passengers and freight away from the train; it experienced a painful civil war and post-war famine; and, finally, its tracks crossed depopulated places that were becoming even more depopulated decade after decade.

In this part of La Mancha, things seemed to look good and the project reached an advanced stage, with the rails laid from Albacete to the provincial border with Jaén, leaving only the signage to be installed. But only the trains used for the building work ran on those rails, since, in 1963, a fateful report by the World Bank stated that this and a few other lines should not be put into operation –it was thought that they would not be profitable and would take the rest of the national railway system down with them.

In Albacete, the rails rusted for decades and were finally removed in the late 1980s. In the rest of the Jaén route, which had many stations, spectacular viaducts and long tunnels, everything was forgotten until it was upgraded as part of the current greenway programme.