In spite of the fact that attempts were made to build a railway through the capital of Jaen since 1881, it was not until 1893 when the first trains ran through this city on their way to Puente Genil. With this new line, the Compañía de los Ferrocarriles Andaluces created a new access route into Andalusia from Linares which connected at Puente Genil with existing routes from Cordoba to Malaga and Algeciras. The line was to compete with the main railway access to Andalusia from the Castilian tableland which ran through the Guadalquivir valley and was operated by the all-powerful MZA railway company.

One of the most important cargos carried by the new railway was bulk olive oil transported in tank wagons. The transport of olive oil was so important that the railway came to be known popularly as the “Olive Oil Train”, a name which our Greenway today has inherited. But as well as olive oil, the railway also used to transport coal from the Belmez coalfields, and lead and other metals from the deposits around Linares, to the port of Malaga.

But the railway was never really a financial success. Except for a brief period of prosperity at the end of the 19th century during the Cuban War, the business made losses year after year. Thus in 1936, this line, along with all the other lines making up the extensive “Andalusian” railway network, was taken over by the State when it was seen that the company’s financial position was unsustainable.

Another conflict, the Spanish Civil War, briefly breathed new life into the railway for strategic reasons; the line provided an alternative to the frequently bomb damaged Espeluy-Sevilla line. But when the guns fell quiet, so did the locomotives, which became an increasingly rare sight on the line, and when they did run it was at the breathtaking average speed of 30 km/h!. The railway remained in this precarious situation until 1985 when the entire section between Jaen and Puente Genil was closed down, along with hundreds more kilometres of line all over Spain. Fifteen years on, machines of another kind ran along the ballast rail bed to convert it into the magnificent Greenway that it is today.