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Commuter rail service serving Madrid, Spain

Cercanías Madrid is the commuter rail service that serves Madrid, the capital of Spain, and its metropolitan area. It is operated by Cercanías Renfe, the commuter rail division of Renfe, the former monopoly of rail services in Spain. Its total length is 370 km.

The main Madrid Zaragoza Barcelona line followed the valley of the Henares river, going through the important town of Alcalá de Henares to Guadalajara and Zaragoza. The towns around the line (Coslada, San Fernando de Henares, Torrejón de Ardoz, Alcalá itself) and some suburbs within the city of Madrid (Vallecas Villa, Vicálvaro) started to grow large bedroom communities, which relied heavily in the railway for commuting to Madrid.

At the same time, the former rural towns of Alcorcón, Móstoles, Leganés, Fuenlabrada and Getafe (and some others) started to grow as bedroom communities. These bedroom communities were less rail oriented and relied more in bus services and private transportation, but soon the rail services were enlarged: in the Madrid Toledo line for the towns of Getafe and Parla, in the Madrid Talavera de la Reina line for Leganés and Fuenlabrada, and in 1976 a wide Iberian gauge line between Madrid and Móstoles was built, substituting the narrow gauge line closed in 1970. At this time, the services were full part of the normal RENFE services, and the cars and stations had the standard livery of the rest of the company. In the 1980s, services started to operate between Madrid Chamartín and the new town of Tres Cantos, serving also the Autonomous University of Madrid campus, in Cantoblanco.

The 11 March 2004 attacks occurred in four trains circulating by the Madrid Alcalá Guadalajara Zaragoza line. One of the trains was a double decker 450 series which served the C 2 line coming from Guadalajara to Chamartín; the other three were 446 series who departed from Alcalá de Henares: two serving the C 1 line to Alcobendas and one serving the C 7 line, finishing in Príncipe Pío. After the attacks, services were reintroduced the following day, with RENFE private security reinforced. Security measures and design of the rolling stock have been accredited to having notably reduced the number of casualties in the attacks.

In 2008, the opening of the second north south rail tunnel through Madrid allowed the C 3, from Aranjuez, and the C 4, from Parla, which used to finish at Atocha, to continue their route further to the north, the C 3 to El Escorial, and the C 4 to Alcobendas San Sebastián de los Reyes or Colmenar Viejo alternatingly, passing through Madrid. The next year, the rail station of Puerta del Sol in downtown Madrid, part of this second tunnel, was inaugurated. The old C 1 line was absorbed into the C 4 and until 2011 there was no C 1 line, when it was revived as the railway to the Madrid Barajas Airport was inaugurated. Since 2011 no new lines have been enacted, and the link to the Parque Warner Madrid theme park was closed because of lack of use. The improvements have consisted of insertion of new stations in the existing lines and further connections to the Madrid Metro, such as the access from the Sol rail station to the Gran Vía Street, opened in 2021.

Rather strangely for such a night living city as Madrid, trains do not operate late at night, mostly for union and safety reasons. The first train to operate on weekdays is the 5:07 C 5 train from Móstoles/El Soto; the rest of the lines (except C 9) start to operate around 5:30 am. Line C 9, being a branch line located far away from central Madrid in the Sierra de Guadarrama, operates from 9:30 am to 10:30 pm. The frequency of the trains depends on the size of the towns served and the traffic on the line. The central section of the network, from Atocha to Chamartín, through Recoletos and Nuevos Ministerios, has trains every 3–4 minutes (of various lines) on weekday peak hours; the farther branches of the C 8 line have trains every two hours on weekends. All lines (except C 9) finish their operations around midnight.

CIVIS is a special service which operates on some lines: first on C 10 and C 3, and later on C 2. The CIVIS services uses the direct railway line between Chamartín and San Fernando without stopping and thus provides faster through service to San Fernando and stations beyond.

As Renfe is (at the moment) a constituent of the Spanish Ministry of Infrastructure, and national infrastructure development projects during the last ten years have focused on the development of the Spanish high speed network, funding for new lines has been scarce and growth has been slow (in comparison with the rocket paced growth of the Madrid Metro). As the Cercanías network is the only public transportation system in Madrid which is owned by the Spanish central state (in comparison with the Metro and bus services, owned regionally, municipally and privately) this difference has been exploited politically. A harsh debate between the Madrid regional government (which operates the Metro) and the central government (which operates the Cercanías) about who is responsible for building the line to the new terminal of the Barajas Airport delayed the construction of any rail link. The Madrid Metro Line 8 extension to Terminal 4 opened in May 2007, while the Cercanías link did not open until 2011.