Museo del Ferrocarril de Madrid

Six thousand three hundred objects fill this former station built in 1880 when King Alfonso XII and Queen María Cristina attended its opening ceremony here on Paseo de las Delicias. The iron architecture wrapping around you—the soaring glass roof, the steel framework—represents Spain's solution to connecting a mountainous landscape impossible for traditional roads. Behind that glass screen near the entrance sits an Algodor hydraulic interlock from the early 1900s, so rare it's considered an industrial heritage gem most visitors pass without noticing. Step inside the main hall and you're surrounded by locomotives and carriages tracing Spain's complete railway evolution from steam to diesel to electric. To the side stretches a three-hundred-square-meter model layout with eight hundred fifty meters of track supporting sixty-six different trains simultaneously—one of Europe's most spectacular railway dioramas. When this museum opened December nineteenth, nineteen eighty-four, it transformed a station that operated for eighty-nine years into a living chronicle. That same year, the legendary Strawberry Train began running from here to Aranjuez in restored heritage carriages, a tradition continuing every spring and autumn, carrying travelers through the same routes their great-grandparents once journeyed.