Railways in Sardinia

The first, the Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane group, manages the 4 ordinary gauge railway lines that make up the main network of the island through the subsidiaries RFI and Trenitalia.

After various doubts and objections from national politicians, in 1862 an Italian-English consortium, headed by cavalier Gaetano Semenza, obtained the concession for the construction of the network that would link Cagliari to Iglesias, Porto Torres and Terranova Pausania (in Olbia).

The construction of the planned lines, based on a project by the Welsh engineer Benjamin Piercy, ended in 1881, but in the meantime, for the traffic of passengers to the continent, it was decided to use the new maritime docking of Golfo Aranci instead of that of Terranova.

Given the specific request for an economy construction, it was decided to use a 950 mm track gauge, which would also have helped the engineers in planning the routes in the inaccessible internal areas of Sardinia/ The following year the works were entrusted to the " Italian Society for the Secondary Railways of Sardinia " (SFSS), which, building at a fast pace, inaugurated its first lines after only 17 months.

However, the project was not without criticism from many users, who contested the excessive distance of most of the stations from their respective villages,[7] which was linked to the exploitation of the internal forests of the island, whose valuable timber was transported by the new railway.

[7][8] In 1898, meanwhile, the extension of the ordinary gauge network grew by 6 km, those of the new portion of the railway track open between Iglesias and its hamlet Monteponi, strategically important for the transport of minerals that were extracted in this location and in the surrounding area.

Despite the complaints, both networks fully achieved the purpose for which they were born, that is to encourage the transport of people and goods between the various areas of Sardinia, until then only linked to animal traction vehicles.

Other lines were planned, such as those of the Sulcis (whose connections at that time were ensured by car transport[9]), but the war forced a postponement of the works, while some proposals for relations in the Sassari area were taken into consideration in the subsequent years.