The Decauville railway at Láchar was an long

narrow-gauge A narrow-gauge railway (narrow-gauge railroad in the US) is a railway with a track gauge (distance between the rails) narrower than . Most narrow-gauge railways are between and . Since narrow-gauge railways are usually built with tighter curv ...

railway with a gauge of from

Íllora Íllora is a municipality in the province of Granada, located in Andalucia. Spain. It is surrounded by the following villages: Moclín, Pinos Puente, Valderrubio, Moraleda de Zafayona, Villanueva Mesía, Montefrío, and with the municipality of ...

- Láchar railway station via the Eiffel Bridge to the sugar mill in Láchar.

Route

The long

Decauville Decauville () was a manufacturing company which was founded by Paul Decauville (1846–1922), a French pioneer in industrial railways. Decauville's major innovation was the use of ready-made sections of light, narrow-gauge track fastened to st ...

railway with rails weighing 9,5 kg/m (19 lbs/yard) ran over two metal bridges, of which one was designed

Gustave Eiffel Alexandre Gustave Eiffel ( , ; Bonickhausen dit Eiffel; 15 December 1832 – 27 December 1923) was a French civil engineer. A graduate of École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures, he made his name with various bridges for the French railway net ...

and erected by

Fives-Lille Fives-Lille was a French engineering company located at Fives, Nord, Fives, a suburb of Lille. It is now part of the Fives Group. History The company began as in 1861. The founders and were of Belgian origin. The company later entered into a ...

.Carlos Peña und Pachi Calvo
''El ferrocarril de la azucerera de Láchar.''
10 May 2008. The track on the site of the sugar mill was long. It ended at a

turntable A phonograph, later called a gramophone, and since the 1940s a record player, or more recently a turntable, is a device for the mechanical and analogue reproduction of sound. The sound vibration waveforms are recorded as corresponding phys ...

at the western end of the site.Pedro Salmeron Escobar
''Lachar. Fábrica del Conde de Benalúa.''
In: ''Estudio del paisaje de la industria azucarera de la Vega de Granada.'' October 2016, p. 109–123.

History

Growing

sugar beet A sugar beet is a plant whose root contains a high concentration of sucrose and that is grown commercially for sugar production. In plant breeding, it is known as the Altissima cultivar group of the common beet (''Beta vulgaris''). Together with ...

s and producing sugar from them caused a major structural change in the

Vega de Granada The Vega de Granada is a ''comarca'' (county, but with no administrative role) in the province of Granada, in Andalusia, Spain. The name refers to the basin near the city of Granada. This comarca was established in 2003 by the Government of Anda ...

at the end of the 19th century.Pedro Salmerón Escobar, Fermín Seño Asencio, Rosa María Pérez de la Torre und Diego Garzón Osuna
Diego Garzón Osuna ''Estudio del paisaje de la industria azucarera en la Vega de Granada: Estrategias para su preservación y uso sostenible.''
Page 347. The landlord and businessman Julio Quesada y Piedrola, Duke of San Pedro de Galatino, Count of Benalúa and Señorío de Láchar planned and contracted the sugar mill and the industrial railway during or shortly after the

Exposition Universelle (1889) The of 1889 (), better known in English as the 1889 Paris Exposition, was a world's fair held in Paris, France, from 6 May to 31 October 1889. It was the fifth of ten major expositions held in the city between 1855 and 1937. It attracted more t ...

in Paris. It was put into service in 1890. King

Alfonso XIII Alfonso XIII (Spanish language, Spanish: ''Alfonso León Fernando María Jaime Isidro Pascual Antonio de Borbón y Habsburgo-Lorena''; French language, French: ''Alphonse Léon Ferdinand Marie Jacques Isidore Pascal Antoine de Bourbon''; 17 May ...

, a personal friend of the Count of Benalúa, visited and used the railway to travel to the sugar factory. It was closed in 1926, due to the crisis in the sugar industry.

Rolling stock

There were two Decauville steam locomotives and 46 waggons of different types.

External links

''Routa del Señorío de Lachar''

References

{{coord, 37.199470, -3.834367, region:ES_type:building, display=title, name=Sugar mill Narrow-gauge railways in Spain Railway lines opened in 1890 Railway lines closed in 1926 600 mm gauge railways