As a portuguese and a train enthusiast I would like to suggest an introduction to my country, the railways in the city Lisbon and the Greater Lisbon area. In Portugal passanger trains are mostly state owned and operate under the state company CP - Comboios de Portugal (Trains of Portugal) First I'd like to show you a diagram of Greater Lisbon's commuter routes Here we can see the following routes: - Sintra Line - Cascais Line - Cintura Line - Azambuja Line Starting with the Cascais Line, it was the first route in the country to be electrified with a voltage of 1,5 Kv (1500 volts), and the only electrified route in the country with that voltage, a consequence of being the first electrified route. The route connects the wealthy municipality of Cascais on the west, with Oeiras and the Cais do Sodré terminal station in Lisbon Because of its close proximity with the river Tagus, you have an amazing view of the river throught the entire route. A train near the Cascais end of the route We now move to the Sintra Line, it is the most used route in the country and connects the municipality of Sintra to the Rossio terminal station in Lisbon, Oriente station also in Lisbon and Alverca to the North. Let's take a closer look As you can see each colour represents a service (by the way, please ignore the purple and the grey lines for now, I'll talk about them right after this) First the red Line, the Sintra - Rossio service, a standard during rush hour and the second shortest service on the route. Next the blue line, showing two different services: Mira Sintra-Meleças - Oriente, another standard service during rush hour Sintra - Oriente, kind of a combination extending the service to Oriente The 2 rush hour services usually use the route with a 5 minute interval to each other and use different station platforms, this is because the route has a 4 track setup allowing 2 trains to go in the same direction at the same time, but having 2 trains going the same way at the same place is usually bad news, at least one of them is late Because the tracks were by default built for these rush hour services, anytime there is a Sintra - Oriente service, at some point the train must change tracks, by default in this route the trains have to slow down to 30 km/h to change tracks A part of the Sintra Line with the 4 track setup The yellow line shows a service from either Sintra or Mira Sintra-Meleças to Alverca, this is the longest in this route and it's an hourly service, if you miss it, even for just a couple seconds, you have to wait one hour for the next one, so don't be late! And by the way, those red icons with a white M along the route means the stations with that symbol, connect with the Lisbon subway. We now take a look at the grey and purple lines, this is the Azambuja Line, let's take a closer look As you can see there are 2 terminal stations in this route, Alcantâra Terra and Santa Apolónia, both in Lisbon, and the route terminus station to the north, Azambuja. You can also see, below Alcantâra Terra, by the Alcantâra-Mar station 'Cascais Line' in paranthesis, this is because the Alcantâra Terra station in the Azambuja Line is connected through a track in the narrow gauge format to the Alcantâra-Mar station which belongs to the Cascais Line. The problem is, because all the electrified routes in the country have a 25 Kv (25000 volts) voltage and the Cascais Line is the only route with a 1,5Kv voltage and the electric trains cannot change the voltage they get, this connection is only used by diesel locomotives and freight trains headed by diesel locomotives when something has to go throughtthe Cascais Line. This also means the trains operating in the Cascais Line can only be used in that route as they only work at 1,5 Kv and no other electric trains in the country can't be brought into the route. The route between Santa Apolónia and Azambuja is also the start of the North Line, whcih Ill talk about later in this post. Now I want to talk to you about the Fertagus route, which has already had a quick introduction in another topic by ARGomes69 Link: https://forums.dovetailgames.com/threads/any-portugal-fans.2922/ Fertagus is the only private company in the country operating passanger trains and is the only company which uses the 25th of April bridge for urban commuter services connecting Lisbon to the south margin of the Tagus river in Lisbon the service starts in the Roma-Areeiro station which is in the Cintura and Azambuja Lines, which I talked previously about. As you can see, Campolide, which is also in the Sintra Line, but has different tracks for each service, is the first station on the Lisbon side of the river and Pragal, in the Almada municipality is the first station on the river's south margin. There are 2 services in this route: - Roma-Areeiro - Coina - Roma-Areeiro - Setúbal And now other suggestions for later. The North Line, the most important route in the country connecting Lisbon to Porto and Braga, and the South Line connecting Lisbon to Faro in the Algarve district. It's mostly these 2 routes that use InterCity and Alfa Pendular services, high speed trains running at the allowed max speed int he country, 220km/h. The longest service, connecting Braga in the north to Faro in south, is done by an Afla Pendular train and takes around 6 hours. This concludes the route introduction to Portugal, if you have read this far, thank you and I hope you enjoyed getting to know a little bit of the Portuguese railways. And because english is not my first language I apologize for any spelling and grammar mistakes, I tried my best so that everyone can understand what I wrote. Here's the link for my other topic, Lisbon trains which complements this topic https://forums.dovetailgames.com/threads/portugal-an-extensive-lisbon-view.3111/
Not to forget the regional services that cover the rest of the country, specially smaller cities and rural areas
