The free museum offers Spanish-only tours, though plans are underway for English-speaking guides. I therefore arranged a tour through Madrid's tourism office, which put me in touch with a local guide and translator. A dapper older gentleman sporting a robust mustache and a dark-blue corduroy suit, Jose Fernandez seemed to hark back to an earlier era himself.  To reach the museum from Calle de Atocha, a main thoroughfare near the tourist district, we appropriately opted to take the subway, boarding at Anton Martin on Line 1 of the system's 14 lines. As we hurtled along underground, Fernandez delivered the stats: Metro has 292 stations and more than 174 miles of track and is one of the world's fastest-growing systems. He continued rattling off its virtues as we exited at Bilbao station and walked northeast on Calle de Luchana to the museum's incongruously modern entrance on Chamberi Square.  Once down the spiral staircase and into the cool quiet of the old station, we settled into a small auditorium to watch an introductory video (Fernandez translated most of the Spanish-language film). That's how I learned that Chamberi was an air-raid shelter for residents during the 1930s Spanish Civil War. After the video, we ventured into the dimly lit ticketing area. Here, early-1900s riders would have consulted the fare board -- a ticket cost as low as one peseta (about a penny) back then -- and placed their coins on the worn marble block at the ticket attendant's booth. After they filed through the narrow metal turnstiles, another attendant would "obliterate" their paper ticket (as Fernandez quaintly phrased it) to prevent reuse. As we shuffled through the low, circular halls, the white Sevillian tiles, original to the station, cast an almost ethereal glow. The whiteness, a concept of Metro brainchild and architect Antonio Palacios, was supposed to simulate sunlight and calm the jitters of claustrophobic riders.  I walked down the stairs to the platform, which was blasted with channels of rushing air, and suddenly found myself immersed in color. Across the way, a projector flashed rotating vintage advertisements on blank walls. On our side, original ads made of mosaic tiles stretched down the tunnel, some in shadow under a string of weak light bulbs.  The ads plugged items that would put passengers on track to being -- or, at least, appearing -- wealthier: clothing detergent, pocket watches, jewelry, a "laxative" that was actually mineral water from CarabaÃ±a, a town southeast of Madrid. "It's sold and consumed all over the world," Fernandez translated, as I imagined early-20th-century Europeans with clogged plumbing earnestly chugging the Spanish elixir.
With Western Europe's second-largest subway system, Madrid has all but perfected how to vamoose. So it made sense when the Spanish capital built a museum dedicated to the Metro out of the ashes of...