Castro – Traslaviña line. This was also a mining railway. It was back in 1914 when the railway building and operating company Ferrocarril de San Julián de Musques a Castro Urdiales y Traslaviña was set up in order to link the Triano railway with the Santander-Bilbao line. Its purpose was to carry goods, and from 1922 it was operated by the state railway company, Ferrocarriles del Estado. In 1966 it was shut down due to poor profitability, to a large extent due to the mining crisis. For some years work has been carried out both by the Basque authorities and the Cantabrian municipal authorities of Castro Urdiales to recover the line as a Greenway.

Sestao – Galdames line. It was around 1876 when English entrepreneurs of the Bilbao River and Cantabrian Railway Company Ltd opened a 22 km long railway linking  its mining operations at Galdames with the docks on the Nervión estuary at Sestao. It was the longest of the mining railways of this area and the only one to link the Nervión with the west face of the Montes de Triano hills.

A peculiar gauge (1.14 m) was used to cope with its sinuous route. The railway not only carried the production of the company’s own mines at Galdames but also transported ore from all the mines along its route, hence the large number of loading facilities along the way. The most unusual of these was at La Florida, where an inclined plane nearly 4 km long used to reach the railway from the Sauco Mine. It was one of the longest inclined planes in Spain and had six intermediate stations for transferring wagonloads of ore.

In addition to hauling mineral ore to the port and to the Bilbao steelworks, the railway provided a more or less regular passenger train service. The passengers were none other than the miners themselves who, taking advantage of the readily available transport provided by this railway, started to settled down along the route, creating new mining villages on the very mountainsides: La Balastrera, La Aceña, Saúco... After the Civil War the railway was acquired by another company with an English name, Babcock & Wilcox, which operated ituntil 1968. Four years later, in 1972, the tracks were pulled up and the rail bed was left to be used for new activities.

Kobaron Railway

Around 1860, The Vizcaya and Santander Mining Co. Ltd started to work the San Julián and Amalia Vizcaína mines near the village of Kobaron (Muskiz, Bizkaia). But it was the company of the Scottish engineer José Mac Lennan which a decade later began to exploit and market the mineral on a truly industrial scale. In order to take its production of limonites and siderites to market, the Mac Lennan mining company built a metre-gauge railway, 2.6 km long, between Kobaron and the coastal loading facility at Campomar, where it was shipped to Durham (England). The original animal traction system was replaced by steam locomotives in 1895, whose sheds, water tanks and bunkers were located at the station at Kobaron.

Later a second, unconnected stretch of half-metre gauge railway would be added The railway, known as the Carrascal Railway, used to carry the mineral ore from the San Francisco and Consolation mines, in the Carrascal area, to the station at Kobaron, where the ore would be transferred via two, 20 metre inclined plans onto the Campomar Railway. In 1963 all mining activity was wound up and the loading facility loaded its last shipment.