This Friday, June 30, half a century ago, Berguedà missed the train. The last journey he made was from Olvan to Barcelona on this day in 1973. A year earlier, in 1972, the line from Guardiola to Olvan had already been lost. So, Ignasi Costa was 18 years old and was one of the users who got on that “last trip”. “I remember that people cried with emotion,” he emphasizes.
The loss of this infrastructure was “a turning point” for Berguedà. “It was closing it and beginning a period of decline: the announcement of the industrial crisis,” explains the director of the Center d’Estudis del Transport, Joan Carles Salmeron. Now, a citizen platform has proposed to recover the train-tram from Manresa to Berga, and the Generalitat has commissioned the study to analyze if it is viable.
The construction of the Baells reservoir, in the 70s, precipitated the closure of the railway line from Olvan to Guardiola, in a few years in which the lack of investment had turned it into a non-competitive medium compared to cars.
Antònia Bisbal is the daughter of a family of railway workers. Her father worked at the Puig-reig station and her grandfather was a switch guard. She remembers spending her childhood between trains and how angry she was when they decided to eliminate the rail network. “I saw how all the advanced countries had a train and here they wanted to remove it. The car did a lot of damage because people with money no longer wanted to go by train, ”she laments.
“It was lived with contraction,” explains the director of the magazine L’Erol, Rosa Serra. The Llobregat railway was a work promoted by manufacturers from the banks of the river in order to get their merchandise to Barcelona. The train did not pass through Berga, but it did go through some towns and the neighbors saw it as dirty and dangerous
But eliminating the railway network, in a mountain region far from Barcelona, ??meant losing much more, according to Serra. “The loss of the train announced a deep and long crisis in time. It cannot be said that it precipitated the crisis, but it makes it evident and, in fact, Berguedà still has the challenge of reindustrialising again ”, he underlines.
Now, a group of residents of Bages and Berguedà has created the Tren Tram platform to link Manresa with Berga by rail. They consider that it is a way to fight against the climatic emergency and against the depopulation of this region. In fact, the director of the Center d’Estudis de Transport, Joan Carles Salmeron, assures that this has already been done in other regions of Europe and it has worked: “Just as you can offer healthcare or education, mobility is also a service for people do not leave the territory”.
Salmeron assures that if it has not already been done it is “because we are in southern Europe”. “Because of bureaucracy or administrative slowness, here we are always more in tow,” he underlines. At the moment, the Government has already commissioned the project to analyze if it is viable.
