Quoted By:
Here in Barcelona one of our three commuter systems is metre gauge (another is standard gauge, an the other is the ibarian-gauge mainline railways). This system, together with the standard-gauge one, is owned and operated by the regional government.
The metre-gauge system is the larger of the two with 138km. It consists of a mainline which then splits into two branches, there's also a freight branch which runs to the port, and a rack railway which runs up Montserrat mountain, a popular tourist destination. The rack railway also uses metre gauge, and it is connected to the other lines, but rack trains end at the station where it meets the mainline, and has it's own track and platform there.
The service on this system is pretty mediocre. suburban services are reasonably frequent and convenient, but the farther you go the worse the service gets, since service gets progressively less frequent, and trains stop at all or most stations: There's 22 stations on the mainline alone before it splits into the branch lines, and the branches have 9 and 10 stations. The fastest trains skip just 9 stations, and since the line doesn't allow high speeds this makes long trips excrutiatingly slow.
