Railway Museum (Madrid)

Railway Museum of Madrid

Museo del Ferrocarril
The former Delicias station, the home of the museum
Established	1967 in original location; 1984 in current location
Location	Paseo de las Delicias, 61, Madrid
Director	Carlos Abellán Ruiz
Public transit access	Commuter rail: lines C1 and C10, Delicias railway station. Metro: line 3, Delicias
Website	http://www.museodelferrocarril.org/en/principal.asp

The Museo del Ferrocarril (Railway Museum) in Madrid, Spain, is one of the largest historic railroad collections in Europe. It is housed in a redundant railway station called Madrid-Delicias in the barrio of Delicias. The location is near the centre of Madrid.

The railway museum opened in the Palacio de Fernán Núñez, which is now the seat of the Fundación de los Ferrocarriles Españoles. After an agreement between RENFE and the Ministry of Culture regarding the future of Las Delicias station, the collections were transferred to Las Delicias which opened as a railway museum in 1984.

The building is not to be confused with the station opened in 1996 by Cercanías Madrid called Delicias.

The station was opened in March 1880 by King Alfonso XII and Queen Maria Cristina. It was commissioned by a short-lived railway company, the Compañía de los Caminos de Hierro de Ciudad Real a Badajoz, which had recently opened a line from Ciudad Real to the capital. One reason for the choice of Delicias as the site of the terminus was the proximity of an existing line, the Ferrocarril de contorno de Madrid, which served industrial areas of Madrid.

In the year the station was opened, the railway company was absorbed by a larger rival, MZA. MZA had the use of , and did not need Delicias station, and transferred it to a third company, the Compañía de los Ferrocarriles de Madrid a Cáceres y Portugal. An international service to Portugal was developed, but the station never achieved a high volume of passengers, and it closed to passenger traffic in 1969.

As a terminus, the station had separate facilities for arriving and departing passengers. However, the most impressive feature is the iron-framed train shed covered by a single-span roof.

The building was designed by a French engineer, Émile Cachelièvre. It has been suggested that he was influenced by Henri de Dion´s Galerie des Machines, one of the metallic buildings erected for the Exposition Universelle (1878) in Paris. The Franco-Belgian Fives group provided metal for both projects.