Nowadays there is no one who has never taken a train, it is impossible to imagine life without moving from one place to another. Hundreds of people arrive in Sintra by train every day - around 80% of them tourists and the remaining 20% residents - who would otherwise take a long time to reach their destination, and as the local residents already know, Sintra is a chaos when it comes to parking. For many people there is no better transport than the train, which was also used by the Royal Family, D. Carlos and Dª Amélia often used to travel to Sintra.
In 1854, when work had already begun on the section near Lisbon of the Linha do Leste, the French entrepreneur Claranges Lucotte contracted with the Portuguese government to build a railway between Lisbon and Sintra, this contract appeared in a Government Gazette of 1855, but was abandoned in 1861. The idea of connecting the capital to Sintra resurfaced in 1870, when the engineer M. A. Thomé de Gamond proposed a railway from Santa Apolónia to Colares, serving various localities along the way, including Cascais and Sintra. This project did not have any results, but it served as a basis for the planning of part of the Cascais Line.
On 31st January 1882, it was proposed to the government the construction of a group of lines, connecting Alcântara to Figueira da Foz, with a branch line to Sintra; the sections to Sintra and Torres Vedras were originally attributed to Henry Burnay & C.ª, but the Companhia Real dos Caminhos de Ferro Portugueses, which was only in charge of the connections to Figueira da Foz and Alfarelos, took over the whole project in 1885. This was how the section between Alcântara-Terra and Sintra came into operation, on 2nd April 1887.
In order to get away from the social and political chaos in the capital, D. Carlos and D. Amélia continued the royal tradition of travelling to Sintra. Amélia continued the royal tradition of going to Sintra.
The inauguration of the railway line between Lisbon and the town further reinforced the frequency of these visits, which on several occasions were also of a diplomatic nature.
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