Lower Olona

The Olona Valley has been divided into sections to group the images testifying to this railway line, which definitely had greater potential than its actual use. The Lower Olona segment is geographically closest to the terminus station in the lively settlement of Castellanza.
Factories in Prospiano and Solbiate and the boarding school in Gorla offer plentiful evidence of the flowering of enterprise in the town.

View of the station in Solbiate Olona: behind it stands the Ponti cotton mill, an important industrial enterprise founded in 1823 that made use of the adjacent goods yard.

Gallery

The Marnate - Olgiate Olona station, just after its inauguration on 18th July 1904 as part of the Castellanza – Cairate segment
The Marnate - Olgiate Olona station a few years later, when the signs of time were becoming clear
DE.500.1 travelling through Marnate station
Marnate in 1984: about seven years after its closure, the state of the building and its surroundings clearly demonstrate that they have been largely abandoned
Marnate - Olgiate Olona station appearing abandoned in the final years of operation of the railway line
Prospiano station, in a photograph taken during the Second World War. The station saw action as a theatre of war in a number of episodes. The German command was established in the building across from the station that used to belong to the Cotonificio Bustese cotton mill on Armistice Day, 8th September 1943, and in 1944, the Germans built a bunker for temporary storage of dried sludge containing gold particles from the mines of the Macugnaga area, to be transformed into gold ingots and sent through Switzerland to Germany using the Valmorea railway.
Gorla Minore: the station at the foot of Rotondi boarding school
Gorla Maggiore station in its early years
The Ponti cotton mill in Solbiate Olona and the railway station, on a postcard from the mid-1950s.
Close-up of Solbiate Olona station
Passengers waiting for the train at Gorla Maggiore station
Gorla Maggiore station photographed on the 21st of June 1971
Gorla Maggiore station, already abandoned
The ruins of Gorla Maggiore station in the spring of 1976; the station was demolished only a few years later
The little station of Prospiano as it appears today, used by a local association