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The Pajares incline

Villamanín, La Montaña de Luna, León

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The Pajares incline

Curiosity · Villamanín, La Montaña de Luna, León

Image of Villamanín, not of the place itself.

The rampa de Pajares is the stretch of the León-Gijón railway that overcomes the difference in height of the Cantabrian range at the Pajares pass; its final section was built between 1880 and 1884, one of the greatest works of Spanish engineering of the 19th century. The railway does not cross the pass but goes beneath it, through the Perruca tunnel, the longest of the 61 on the line, with 3072 metres hand-dug between Villamanín, in León, and Lena, in Asturias. On its descent, the line loses 927 metres in altitude through a succession of curves, tunnels and 156 bridges that made it one of the most difficult mountain crossings in Europe, as described in 1970 by the photographer Trevor Rowe. After the opening of the Pajares bypass in 2023, its closure as a rail route is planned.

Photo: No machine-readable author provided. Pastranec assumed (based on copyright claims). (CC BY-SA 3.0)

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