Since the Madrid-Barcelona service started up in February — adding to existing lines linking Madrid to Seville, Malaga and Valladolid — more than 3,000 journeys have been made, 40 per day, and the punctuality average has been in excess of 99 per cent. That figure applies to both the direct runs — 400 miles (about the same as London to Glasgow) in two and a half hours – and those that stop up to four times along the way.
All this has been, for me, a cause of much joy. I have been living in Sitges, just outside Barcelona, for 10 years and have travelled to Madrid by plane countless times. The air shuttle between Spain’s two largest cities is the busiest route in Europe by far, according to EU statistics, and busier, too, than that between New York and Washington DC. But already the AVE — which is invariably packed, despite running 25 trains a day — has taken more than 20 per cent of Iberia’s customers. Count me among them.
I have nothing against Iberia, which I fly everywhere all the time and have found to be as reliable as any airline can be these days. But since I’ve discovered the AVE, aircraft feel so clunky and cramped, so dinosaurishly outdated and, for reasons that are not always to do with the poor old airlines (for instance, having to take off your shoes at the security line), such an incredible pain.
A few weeks back I did the trip to Madrid by air; the return next day, by rail. I left my home at 11.15am. and arrived at Barcelona airport 25 minutes later, an hour before departure – cutting it a bit finer than most people do.
Everything went swimmingly. The check-in and security procedures were quick, the plane left just five minutes late and arrived in Madrid on time. Because it was late morning, the traffic from Madrid airport to the city (often appalling) was reasonably fluid and I made it to my city-centre destination at 14.30.
Three and a quarter hours, then, from point A to point B, in optimal conditions. If you were to allow for a typical delay and rush-hour traffic you could, without being ungenerous, add another hour to that. The problem with planes, and with motoring from airports to big cities, is that there are so many variables that you never quite know.
With the AVE you always do know. First, the chances are you would travel to Barcelona’s Sants station (or Madrid’s Atocha) by local train. This, let us reasonably assume, would take you half an hour. Give yourself 10 minutes before you board the AVE; then the 2½-hour trip on a dedicated AVE track and, since you arrive in the very centre of the cities, let’s say another 20 minutes, at the outside, to your eventual destination. That would make it a total of 3½ hours, 15 minutes longer than your best-case aeroplane scenario.
Maybe you are the sort of person for whom 15 minutes means a great deal, but more likely what matters to you more is arriving on time. What the train allows that the plane does not is the ability to plan – reliably, accurately.
If you are a business traveller from Barcelona and you have a meeting in Madrid at 11am or a lunch at 2pm, you know exactly what time you have to catch the AVE in order to be there at the appointed hour. If you are going by plane, better, just in case, to take one that leaves an hour or two earlier.
I travelled club class, which would be the equivalent of first on an aeroplane. There is also a business class, called ’’preferente”, and tourist. I went club because my travelling companion was Abelardo Carrillo, who happens to be the top man at AVE, its director-general, and because he promised that he would get me into the cabin with the driver.
I had travelled on the AVE several times before, in all three classes, and told him that I did not detect all that much difference. Carrillo did not entirely disagree. The main reason you pay more for one than the other is that the food and drink gets appreciably better the higher you go.
When you enter the AVE the first thing that strikes you is its space-age airiness. The second thing that struck me on this trip was seeing four men in suits sitting across from each other at a wooden table having a business meeting, in English. This prompted Carrillo to say: “The point about the AVE is not just its speed, not just the chronometer factor, but the fact that it allows you to make so much better use of your time… We offer people the chance to get going with their working day in an office space that is enticingly different, placid and agreeable. On a aeroplane it is time lost.”
And the stress factor is virtually nil. You board without any of that boiling irritation that you (or I, at least) often feel having just had to face down the habitual battery of airport indignitie. No one is ordering you to fasten your seat belt or giving you detailed instructions on what to do in the zero-probability event that your conveyance crashes and you survive.
Nor do you have the screech of revving engines, nor the tension as you disengage from mother earth, nor the turbulence on high. Nor the big neighbour digging his fat elbows into your ribs, nor the knees imprisoned hard by the seat in front, nor the drainingly abrupt shifts in atmospheric pressure on short trips, nor the ear pain when you have a cold, nor the vomiting, if you are thus genetically inclined.
Plus you have the sheer pleasure of idly watching the landscape pass by. In the case of this trip, it ranged from the savannah-like meseta of Castille, to the crumbling castles of Aragon, to the mountains on the approach to Zaragoza, to the flat desert after it, to the green fields, ancient towns and grapevines of Catalonia, to the blue of the Mediterranean. And then, whenever you feel like it, there is the liberation afforded by the AVE’s bar or, if you are in club class, a three-course meal. All this at a speed of 300km (186 miles) per hour, which is what Formula One cars do at full pelt.
You get little sense of just how fast you are going until you enter the cabin, where my initial sensation was one of pure terror, as if we were hurtling along on a wild fairground ride. My sense of alarm was not diminished by Carrillo’s informing me that the man at the helm wasn’t actually driving the train at all; the train was. Or, rather, the train’s computer system, which determined whether to accelerate, slow down or brake on the basis of information received, and then decoded, on board, from a sequence of little yellow boxes placed every 12km (7.4 miles) between the rails. The boxes transmitted all the information the train needed — how far ahead the train in front was, whether (highly unlikely) some obstacle might have appeared on the track — for a safe ride.
“The driver’s job,” Carrillo said, “is to supervise the computer, that’s all.” Just as well, because during the last half hour of the trip it started to pour with rain, so much so that visibility out of the cabin’s giant, sloping windscreen was practically zero. No matter: all the “driver” had to do was keep his eye on an uncluttered dashboard consisting of three large computer screens. These reassured him that communications with the yellow transmitter boxes remained clear and told him, among other things, whether the train was running on external power from the cables above, or whether it had reached a point, as it continually did, where it was manufacturing its own electricity. That’s another advantage the train has over the aeroplane: it emits five times less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Yet another is that when you arrive at your destination you already have your luggage with you. Oh, and there’s the price. A return in tourist class Barcelona-Madrid costs €180 (£142), compared with €390 (£308) on the Iberia air shuttle. If you travel club class on the AVE, the price is €358 (£283).
It’s a no-brainer, really. Given a choice on trips within Europe of between, say, 100 and 500 miles, flying is a sadly passé option. As Carrillo put it: “This is pure Darwinism, technological Darwinism. Over these sorts of distances, the aeroplane cannot compete.”
Plans are afoot to extend the AVE network to Valencia and Alicante by 2010, at which point Spain will have the most extensive high-speed train network in the world. Then to Girona and France in 2012 and, after that, via Valladolid, to Santander, Oviedo and Bilbao.
Meanwhile, the Madrid-Barcelona run is going to be a nice little earner for the AVE. So confident is Carrillo of this and of the reliability of his service that he offers passengers a guarantee no airline would dare give: if the AVE arrives at its destination more than 15 minutes late, you get half your fare back; if it is half an hour late, you get a full refund. No such luck for me. My train to Barcelona arrived six minutes ahead of schedule.
Full story from Telegraph.co.uk
