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RAILWAYS IN TRAS OS MONTES DURING THE SECOND HALF OF THE XIXth CENTURY:
PROJECTS AND ACHIEVEMENTS
Hugo Pereira (University of Porto)
On the second half of the 19th century, after 30 years of political turmoil, the Portuguese monarchy was finally solid enough to begin a new economic strategy based on the development of transport infrastructures, essentially railways. The deployment of the very first rails occurred in 1852, however the first law that decreed the building of a rail line to Trás-os-Montes (the one between Oporto and Pinhão, through the Douro valley) was only published in 1867, even though numerous were the projects and suggestions presented since the beginning of the second half of the 19th century in the Portuguese parliament to build railways in the far north-eastern part of Portugal. Despite all this, the first trains would only travel through the southern border of that region in the late 1870’s. This paper aims to shed some light on this issue and to try to explain the reasons of that delay. We will then focus our analysis on the first railroad that served the heart of Trás-os-Montes: the Tua railway. When the Douro line entered Trás-os-Montes, the efforts to grant other railroads through that province grew stronger. Several solutions were presented by the Portuguese engineers, but the Tua railway (from the Douro line to Mirandela) ended up being the chosen one. To do all this, we will mostly use the debates that took place in both houses of the Portuguese Parliament and the reports of the Portuguese engineering since the beginning of the second half of the 19th century until the 1890’s crisis which put the investment on public works on hold.
Hugo Silveira Pereira – short bio
University of Porto
Hugo José Silveira da Silva Pereira was born in Oporto in 1979. In 2005, he completed his History undergraduate program in the Arts and Humanities College of Oporto University. Three years later he completed his master program in Contemporary History in the same institution with an investigation about the relationships between the lower house of the Portuguese parliament and the construction of railways between 1845 and 1860. In 2008, he began his PhD program still in Oporto University.
Until 2011 he published some papers and participated in several congresses with researches about Portuguese railways and Portuguese business history.
He also taught in public and private schools, he participated in the preparation of the inventory of a museum, he worked in Portuguese oral history societies and he did some articles for the Dictionary of Portuguese Business History, directed by professors Amado Mendes and Miguel Figueira de Faria.