| The Tajuña railway was an eminently rural line that was to run from Madrid to the region of Aragon but only made it half way, to the village of Alocén on the banks of the river Tajo. It was officially opened in 1901 when trains began to run from the Niño Jesús station in Madrid, on the edge of the Retiro park. From there the trains would cover the 143 km of metre gauge line until Alocén, a station that is now under the waters of the Tajo behind the Entrepeñas dam. The railway once even had a spur line which ran from Tajuña station, half way between Morata and Perales, to the picturesque villages of Chinchón and Colmenar de Oreja.
The Arganda Train, which whistled more than it went as the saying used to go, could not compete with the ever faster private car, especially since its trains were travelling ever more slowly due to the appalling state of the railway lines and the locomotives. Thus, in 1953 the passenger service was discontinued. For some years after the line was kept less than busy with some goods traffic (mainly beetroot and fruit) but the railway was dying, and gradually more and more stretches of track were torn up. In the winter of 1998 the last section of line, running for 28 km between a cement works in the Madrid suburb of Vicálvaro and the quarries at El Alto near Morata de Tajuña, was finally closed. Until then this section had been kept busy with goods trains carrying limestone aggregate to make cement.
The former passenger lines have been replaced today by a modern above-ground Metro which runs from Madrid to Arganda
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