Spain’s dying railroad towns: Trying to catch a new train to prosperity

Elpais 
17 JAN 2020 (Spain)

A setting sun casts oblique rays over the hamlet of Algodor. In this spur of Madrid territory that bites into Toledo province, a solitary building made in the neo-Mudejar style rises over the reddish-greenish plain. The old train station with its arched windows was erected in 1929 to replace an older, more humble building.

The pillars still show the acronym MZA, for the railway company that built it. The railroad tracks, rusty and overrun with weeds, are lined with two rows of low houses, around 60 in total. An old engine sits sleepily on a siding, still coupled to two dozen freight cars. The deep calm of this place is almost unsettling.

In was in 2005 that silence descended on Algodor. That’s the year that trains stopped passing through on their way to Madrid, after having done so for nearly a century and a half. In 2005, a new high-speed AVE link between Madrid and Toledo was inaugurated, making Algodor station, and the town that grew around it, obsolete.

Source
https://english.elpais.com/elpais/2020/01/17/inenglish/1579258309_541808.html