The Adolfo López Mateos primary school in Naucalpan, State of Mexico, is the only school in the country housed inside a railway carriage. More than 30 years ago, the carriage reached its final destination in the Valley of Mexico, after years of traveling from town to town. It was part of an era when the Ministry of Public Education deployed teachers aboard mobile schools that crossed the country along rail lines then owned by the Mexican state — schools built specifically to educate the children of railway workers, who constantly moved with their families to maintain the vast and complex train network.

The program ran from the 1940s through the 1990s, when the Mexican government chose to privatize the railways, bringing an end to the mobile schools. Today, the carriage sits alongside many other train cars that serve as homes for workers and their families, lining the tracks of the San Bartolo neighborhood in Naucalpan. Professor Jaime Contreras retired in 2024, after teaching there since 1976.