There was a time when Barcelona rejected the tram. And no, it wasn’t at the consultation on the Diagonal reform of mayor Jordi Hereu. Much earlier, at the beginning of the 20th century, the companies that dominated the sector, with the support of the City Council, torpedoed an ambitious metropolitan tramway project that intended to connect with the Baix Llobregat.
The proposed route started from Vallirana and reached the Rambla de Barcelona, ??a 34 kilometer route that crossed the population and commercial centers of the Llobregat valley next to the course of the river and its fertile agricultural lands. It was precisely designed to transport passengers, but also goods.
Its promoter was no mayor ahead of his time. Neither did the few businessmen in the area or some engineer eager to test the infinite possibilities that opened up in the field of transport with the arrival of electricity. The idea was put on the table by Gumersindo de Cosso y Rosa, a businessman who earned his living as a stockbroker at the time at the Mercantile Casino, also known as the Borsí, very close to where he lived and of Barcelona City Council, the institution responsible for stopping the proposed works.
After almost a decade of unsuccessful bureaucratic attempts, the project was buried. There was no record of it anywhere, until the journalist and writer Raúl Montilla, linked to La Vanguardia for almost 20 years and to the Baix Llobregat since its birth, came across actions with which De Cosso sought to obtain funding and pulled the thread Digging through municipal archives and railway magazines of the time such as the Gaceta de los Caminos de Hierro, he has managed to reconstruct the viacrucis tramway in the book De Vallirana a Barcelona. Historical chronicle of the frustrated first major metropolitan tramway, published by the Baix Llobregat Center for Regional Studies.
When Gumersindo de Cosso presented the idea in 1903, he quickly received political and technical approval from the town councils of Hospitalet de Llobregat, Cornellà, Sant Boi, Molins de Rei, Sant Vicenç dels Horts, Cervelló and Vallirana. It was quite an opportunity for economic and urban development for them.
The infrastructure was planned to operate with three power plants built along the route and to incorporate what was then a technical innovation in the route in the center of Barcelona: an underground power system that De Cosso patented in Spain in 1905 and which is the basis of what will be released in the coming months on the section between Glòries and Verdaguer. With this system, the installation of catenaries and poles is avoided, but this innovation did not convince the City Council at the time.
They put blemishes on it, even though what bothered the Catalan capital was not the innovative system. The route wanted to reach the heart of the Catalan capital and the tram companies that were already operating in the big city, with the Marquis of Foronda at the head, came out with all the artillery against it. Allegations, technical reports and procedures bordering on illegality with reckless dismissals and draconian conditions delayed the works. So much so that even the Ministry of Development and the Civil Government intervened, which supported the common front of the mayors of the Baix Llobregat and economic sectors such as the agricultural employers.
Nothing managed to push it forward and Gumersindo de Cosso, who was also from the Conservative Monarchic Centre, disappeared from the map with the Tragic Week of 1909. And with it, a tram that was replaced by the Llobregat-Anoia railway line after a while.
