But the trains in Cuba used standard gauge. And the early trains in the north of Spain used (and still use) a narrow-gauge. It was when the central government decided to build a nation-wide network that the Iberian-gauge was chosen, making it incompatible with both the pre-existing Spanish railways and other continental European railways, in the infamous "Informe Subercase" [1]. It is the perfect example of design-by-committee, in which no technical reasons are given other than there are wider and narrower gauges, so they choose an arbitrary middle ground.
Maken|9 months ago
bast copy of the Subercase report I could find: [1] https://www.agrupament.cat/documents/Informe%20Subercase.pdf