About this journey

Régua station, which opened on 15 July 1879 as a provisional stop on the Douro Line, sits at the confluence of the Corgo and Douro rivers. Before the railway arrived, the river journey between Peso da Régua and Porto took between six and eight days by boat; the line reduced that connection to a matter of hours. Régua also served as the junction for the metre-gauge Corgo Line, whose first section opened on 12 May 1906; the remains of that station and the Corgo railway bridge are visible in the opening minutes of the journey before the route turns east along the Douro.

The Douro Line was built between 1875 and 1887 to connect the vineyards and quintas of the valley with the port of Porto, and the landscape makes that purpose plain throughout the 68.2 km to Pocinho. Terraced vineyards climb the schist slopes on both banks, concentrated on the north side for greater insolation. The line is unelectrified along this section, and the CP Class 1400 diesel locomotive works through a succession of tunnels, protection galleries, and stretches where speed limits drop as low as 10 km/h over geologically unstable ground. At Pinhão, the heart of the Cima Corgo wine sub-region, the valley briefly opens before narrowing again past Tua, where the former metre-gauge Tua Valley Line once branched 133 km north toward Bragança, closed in 2008. Beyond the Valeira hydroelectric plant, rated at 236 MW, the line enters the drier Douro Superior sub-region and crosses the Ferradosa Bridge, a 375-metre span completed in 1980 to replace the 1887 original flooded by the Valeira dam reservoir.

Pocinho has been the terminus of the Douro Line since 1988, when the onward section to Barca d'Alva and the Spanish border was closed. Until that same year, the station also served as the interchange with the narrow-gauge Sabor Line, which had operated since 1911, handling iron-ore traffic transhipped to broad-gauge wagons for the port of Leixões. The passenger building is decorated with azulejos by Gilberto Renda and J. Oliveira depicting scenes of daily life in the surrounding region — a quiet contrast to the remote, river-carved corridor the journey has followed from Régua.