Session I. Origins, Evolution and Development of the Railway in Castilla-La Mancha. 
Coordinators: Francisco de los Cobos (Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha), Daniel Marín Arroyo (Junta de Comunidades de Castilla-La Mancha y UNED), José Ángel Gallego Palomares (Junta de Comunidades de Castilla-La Mancha), and Francisco Polo Muriel (Fundación de los Ferrocarriles Españoles)

The railway network entered the territory of what is now Castilla-La Mancha in the early years of the development of this mode of transport on the Iberian Peninsula, integrating it into the new global space being created by the railway. Its expansion across the five provinces materialized early on, throughout the second half of the 19th century, forming a conventional network of Iberian and metric gauge railways, which reached its peak during the 1940s with the completion of the section between Cuenca and Utiel. Similarly, this region was one of the first in the State to join the new high-speed rail network that emerged from 1992 onwards. The history of this relationship, now close to 175 years, between the Castilla-La Mancha region and the railway is what this session aims to promote, encompassing case studies that, from a historical perspective, analyze the effects of this mode of transport in Castilla-La Mancha, from the local to the regional level, covering all aspects related to the railway phenomenon from the mid-19th century to the present day.

Session II. Mechanisms of punishment and discipline in railway companies: An international perspective. 
Coordinators: Fernando Mendiola Gonzalo (Universidad Pública de Navarra-UPNA) and Carles Gorini Santo (Institut Català de Recerca en Patrimoni Cultural-ICRPC)

Session III. The Internationalization of Railway Companies (19th-21st Centuries). 
Coordinators: Ana Cardoso de Matos (CIDEHUS-Universidade de Évora), Domingo Cuéllar (Universidad Rey Juan Carlos), and Pedro Pablo Ortúñez Goicolea (Universidad de Valladolid)

The expansion of the railway led to a novel development of knowledge, technology, and professions, which were also organized into new business structures. This model expanded from the pioneering industrialization countries (Great Britain, Belgium, France, or the United States) to follower countries and regions (Italy, Spain, Portugal, Latin America, etc.), soon turning the railway into a symbol of the first globalization.

The broad mobility of capital and labor factors were the drivers of this 19th-century process, in a framework dominated by exploitation by private companies. However, in the 20th century, with the progressive nationalization of railway companies, there was also an intense exchange of knowledge and technology through successive innovation processes that the railway underwent, especially in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, with modernization associated with the operation of high-speed trains and increasingly intense metropolitan traffic networks.
For this session, we are interested in receiving communication proposals that investigate how these internationalization processes occurred in the railway sector, both from a long-term perspective and in case studies, where the focus was on the role of capital, human capital, or technology in railway operations, both in the early phases of railway expansion and in the more recent processes of modernization and transformation of the railway system.

Session IV. Railway and City. 
Coordinators: Luis Santos y Ganges (Universidad de Valladolid) and Doralice Sátyro Maia (Universidade Federal da Paraíba)

The objective of the session is to intertwine railway history with urban history, even better if it is spatialized history. In this interrelation of the city (urban space, urban life, economic dynamism, housing, industry, tourism, etc.) with the railway (its tracks, its facilities, its interurban or intraurban profile, its personnel, its operation, etc.), there are numerous issues concerning railway history. Thus, with these senses of railway-city interrelation, diverse contributions are welcome, in the Iberian, European, and Ibero-American contexts:

• • Communications regarding the history of urban trams, metropolitan railways, and suburban railways.
  • Communications on the relationship of railway systems with urban extension, form, and structure.
  • Communications on the history of stations, especially explanations of their urban integration and architecture.
  • Communications on the patrimonial characterization of industrial railway heritage, based on historical and functional aspects of railway engineering.
  • Communications on the evolution of railway systems in cities: relocations of lines and stations, closures, reuse projects.
  • Communications on the problem of the railway’s barrier effect on transverse communications to the tracks, the role of the railway line as a social barrier (social differentiation, social segregation, fragmentation), level crossings and grade-separated crossings, gatekeepers, accidents, and enclosures, among many other related issues.
  • Communications on large railway technical facilities, such as Depots and Workshops: their structure, operation, social significance, and urban effects.

Session V. Historiography and the privatisation of the railways in the historiography and the privatisation of the Ibero-American railways: a review of authors, themes and collections.
Coordinators: Guillermo Guajardo Soto (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) and Leonor Reyes Pavón (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México)
Hybrid session (in-person and remote participation)

In 1998, the Fundación de los Ferrocarriles Españoles published Historia de los ferrocarriles de Iberoamérica (1837-1995), a work coordinated by the prominent economic historian Jesús Sanz Fernández, with a great historical balance and systematisation of the trajectories and the dialectic between the public and the private in the shaping of this means of transport, highlighting that a new historical cycle was opening with the privatisations already begun in Argentina (1990), Chile (1992), Mexico (1997) and Brazil a year later. He stressed that a new generation of railways was being born ‘whose destiny will have to be written during the next 21st century’. However, it also initiated a complex and unstudied process of loss, and sometimes conservation, of the documentation and material heritage of the privatised companies, with consequences for the possibilities of historical research on the railways in the region.
In this respect, the roundtable has three purposes: 1) to review the contributions of the Historia de los ferrocarriles de Iberoamérica (1837-1995) (History of the Ibero-American railways (1837-1995), and to take stock of the research topics opened up since the 1990s on aspects raised by the privatisations such as the role of the bureaucracy, the relations of the railway companies with the business sector, economic performance, technological and labour change, among many others; 2) to begin to write the history of the origins of the privatisations of the 1990s which, although attributed to the impact of the economic crisis of 1982, have historical depth, as Sanz indicated, the product of a permanent dialectic between the public and private sectors from the 19th century to the present day, detecting the debates, authors and institutions that developed diagnoses, plans and policies that would be applied within the framework of neoliberal reforms; 3) finally, to find out the fate and situation of the documentary collections and the technological heritage of the privatised companies.

Session VI. Railway Cultural Heritage. 
Coordinators: Aurora Martínez-Corral (Universidad Politécnica de Valencia) and Diego Peris Sánchez (Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha)

The concept of railway heritage could be defined as a complex, interrelated, and characteristic set integrated within the broader category known as industrial heritage. This includes movable material heritage (machines, signaling elements, tools, uniforms, etc.) and immovable heritage (public works, stations, housing, warehouses, roundhouses, lines, among others); documentary heritage (photographs, plans, archives, etc.); artistic heritage (sculptures, paintings, or drawings with railway themes); as well as intangible heritage and railway landscape. This broad and diverse set, changing and dynamic, requires being approached from different academic disciplines and perspectives whose interaction allows for deepening, discovering, and innovating in the knowledge of it.
The session aims to compile and showcase studies and research, projects, methodologies, analysis tools, study proposals, works and restorations, inventories, or others that allow understanding the current state of railway heritage, as well as to profile and expand, discern and clarify this complex set that is both unique and singular.

Session VII: Industrial Railways, Secondary Lines, and Private Branches. 
Coordinators: Javier Revilla Casado (Universidad de León) and Sheila Palomares Alarcón (Universidade de Évora)

From the moment the first railway lines emerged in the 19th century, an increasing number of industries requested and obtained private branches that allowed them to connect directly to the network, with all the advantages this entailed. Initially, the transport of goods by rail was closely linked to mining, especially until the First World War, but from 1940 onwards, it was increasingly used to transport other products. This was also favored by the implementation of secondary lines, largely proposed to boost the economy in less developed areas.
In this context, this session aims to gather and discuss communications that analyze the relationship between the lines (main and secondary) and the private branches of industries, mines, and any other production, transformation, and/or goods transport centers. It will also include investigations that analyze how the connection between industries and the railway was made. Did the tracks influence the architectural project?
Within this field of industrial railways, the session can include investigations from multiple perspectives: history of the routes, industrial heritage, company studies, expropriations and implementation, analysis of engineers and architects, stations and buildings, railway personnel, trade and goods transport, line exploitation, communication and rural world travelers, accidents and incidents, labor movement, splendor and decline, locomotives and rolling stock, unrealized projects…

Session VIII: History of Women Railway Workers. 
Coordinators: Solange Godoy (Universidad Nacional de San Martín/CONICET) and Belén Moreno Claverías (Universidad de Oviedo)

The role of women workers in railways companies has traditionally been little considered in academic studies. However, in certain countries, the made up a numerically important group and performed essential tasks for the proper functioning of the companies, tasks that had to be combined with household chores and family care. Many of them were gatekeepers, a function that entailed great responsibility and a high accident rate, which was not reflected in their wages, which were extremely low. Other women were dedicated to cleaning the facilities, a job that was equally necessary but also undervalued. There was a smaller group of women who required more education and technical training, such as ticket sellers, clerks, stewardesses, engineers, teachers and even machine operators or machinists.
This thematic session will gather proposals that give visibility to women railway workers throughout history, addressing topics such as working conditions, living conditions, their role in domestic economies, labor trajectories, political and union participation, repressive processes, business policies, cultural and artistic representations, among others. So, we welcome papers related to the analysis of the role of railway women, taking into account their own perspective and agency, as well as how they were perceived from social, economic, business, political, and cultural spheres.

Session IX: Young Researchers. 
Coordinators: Laura Lalana Encinas (Universidad de Burgos) and Víctor Sanchís Maldonado (Universidad Rey Juan Carlos)

This session is aimed at researchers in training, doctoral candidates, and doctors with less than six years since obtaining their degree or under 35 years old. Its purpose is to provide a space for the presentation of research related to the history of transport and communication infrastructures, with a particular emphasis on studies of Ibero-America. It seeks to foster academic debate, constructive feedback, and the strengthening of academic networks.
During this process, young researchers will receive direct feedback from experts in the field, allowing them to enrich their research and develop new perspectives. The communications presented will be considered for publication in the Association’s journal, TST. Additionally, ASIHF will try to support, as much as possible, the travel of participants, seeking to facilitate their participation in this event.

Session X: General. 
Coordinators: Olga Macias Muñoz (Universidad del País Vasco/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea-UPV/EHU) and Tomás Martínez Vara (Universidad Complutense de Madrid-UCM)

Given the transversal nature of the railway, the congress organization invites researchers studying topics not included in the previous sessions to submit communications for presentation in this session, where they will be thematically grouped if necessary.