18 – Eurocruise – Zaragoza – Part 2 More photos from Zaragoza. Description of the visit was provided in Part 1.

Above and top of next page: Views at the northern end of Zaragoza’s attractive downtown area. There is no overhead wire in the “old city” and therefore the pantographs of the LRVs have been lowered. The cars operate over about 1¼ miles of unwired track between La Chimenea and Gran Via using electricity stored in their super capacitors. This is the proprietary “Rapid Change Accumulator” system developed by CAF and joins two other Altstom-developed systems in commercial use. A strip embedded between the rails of each track at the 4 intermediate stops is electrified only when a car is resting above it. The LRVs capacitor is then charged sufficiently to permit the vehicle to proceed to the next stop. Thus the propulsion source is carried on the cars, much like the system in Nice, where batteries drive the trams where the tracks are free of catenary. But in another manner the concept shares technology with the APS system on several tramways in France, where the power source feeding the vehicles is only active when it is entirely covered by the cars, thereby preventing what could be fatal electric shocks to pedestrians. .

A view along the Rambla south of Gran Via station, where the cars operated under conventional overhead. The tracks are still separated leaving a wide area for pedestrians to amble.

The line ducks under RENFE railway tracks near its northern end. New real estate development in the Parque Goya area (nothing to do with Goya station) came with the tramway.

Previous page bottom and above: This desolate section near the northern end of the line is ripe for development.

Long single track loop on one-way parallel streets at the southern end of line.

Klaus Matzka has provided us with excellent photo he took in Zaragoza in 1968. Phil Stevenson sent the photo on the next page of me taking the top photo of the AVW train that appears on page 4 in part 1. Now if only there was somebody taking a photo of Phil taking a photo of me, and then somebody . . . He wrote: The holiday we encountered in Zaragoza was more than just Aragon Day. It is celebrated throughout the old Kingdom of Aragon, including Catalonia and Mallorca, and in many other countries, including England. The tradition in Aragon is for men to give roses to their ladies and for people to exchange books, hence the abundance of bookstalls on Zaragoza's Gran Via on the day of our visit. I saw a similar abundance of bookstalls on La Rambla on our return to Barcelona, after we parted and you returned to your cruise ship.