The train in Spain runs mainly on the plain

This is a piece about days out on the train. As usual I got distracted. If you're not interested in the Spanish railway system skip the next four paragraphs

I was told, ages ago, that, where there are twin tracks, Spanish trains "drive" on the left. That is they use the left hand set of rails in relation to the direction they're travelling. The reason, so said my informant, was that the first railways in Spain were built by British engineers and without giving it a second thought the Britons built the system that way around. It turns out that I was lied to. It's partly true in that the first line on the peninsula did use a British Engineer but his line, from Barcelona to Mataró, opened in 1848, ran trains on the right. 

As the railways boomed the first big Spanish railway company - MZA - Compañía de los Ferrocarriles de Madrid a Zaragoza y Alicante - bought the Barcelona to Mataró line. They bought the direction of travel too. MZAs big competitor in the pioneering days of Spanish rail was the Compañía de los Caminos de Hierro del Norte de España and they chose to drive on the left. Nobody nowadays seems to know why, maybe simply to be contrary. To this day the majority of Spanish trains drive on the right though there are parts of the network where that's not the case. Not that it's an ordinary train line but the Madrid underground network goes left for instance. Mind you in Madrid, until 1924, the cars apparently drove on the left too!

It's not quite true but, today, in broad stroke the track, the stations, the signals - the infrastructure - is owned by ADIF and the rolling stock, the trains and coaches and wagons, is owned by RENFE. Recently some low cost operators have moved into Spain and they own trains and rolling stock which runs on the lines owned and operated by ADIF. They only operate on the international gauge lines. Mostly, if you're going to catch a train like train you're going to travel with RENFE.

The width of railway lines, the gauge, can vary from country to country and even from line to line. In Spain there are three types of train gauge - narrow, conventional and high speed. The narrow gauge railways use a metre gauge - for instance the Alicante Tram and the railway from Cartagena to Los Nietos use this gauge. The traditional rail network uses a gauge of 1,668 milímetros and the high speed trains use the gauge which is often called International because it's the most common gauge in the world. It's the one that George Stephenson first used, 1,435 mm, though he thought it was 4' 8½".

The nearest place to catch a train, if you live in Pinoso, is Elda/Petrer near the Elda hospital. At one time, on that same line, there was a station just outside Monóvar which still has the name plaque Monóvar-Pinoso on it. I suppose in much the same way that there is a halt at Sax which was re-opened a few years ago the possibility exists that that station could be reopened but, at the moment, it's just an easy target for graffiti taggers. After Elda/Petrer the next nearest "serious" station, for the traditional network, is in the centre of Villena near the Teatro Chapí. A bit farther afield there are stations at Alicante, Elche, Cieza and Murcia. The nearest High Speed Stations are on the outskirts of Villena and Elche. They are both in quite odd locations. The Elche one is in some village just off the motorway about 12 kms from the town centre but the Villena one is in full countryside down a winding country road. At least it means if you're willing to leave your car on a dirt road you can avoid car park charges travelling from there!

The high speed trains are called AVEs, (it's pronounced a bit like avay) AVANT (high speed trains for mid distance) and ALVIA which are able to use both the high speed lines and the conventional lines. I'm not sure what the speed records are for the AVE trains but I've been on plenty that have clicked along at 300k/h and the fastest I've seen personally is 308k/h.

From Villena you can catch a high speed train to Elche, Orihuela and Murcia in one direction but it's much more likely that you'd want to go the other way - towards Madrid. There is a mid point stop in Albacete and some trains stop in Cuenca. The ALVIAs may stop in other places. There are low cost trains on the route from Alicante to Madrid. RENFE's low cost service is called AVLO and a French firm called Ouigo runs the same route. If one of the cheap trains stops at Villena it's likely that it will be the same price or more expensive than catching the same train from Alicante to Madrid. The cheap trains are usually timetabled so that it's not feasible to go out and back in a day but it's no longer impossible. Parking costs in Alicante obviously add to the price and the cheap trains have all sorts of extra add on charges, big suitcases and the like, similar to the low cost airlines. You can get there and back from Villena in a day with the usual RENFE trains and with a bit of timetable checking you can often find a good price if you're willing to be flexible. RENFE has a very strange policy about when it releases train schedules and often you can't book things up more than six weeks in advance. The RENFE website is notoriously dodgy to use too but at least it's available in English. One of the nice things is that you always get an allocated seat. The RENFE website is worse than useless if you need to change trains and a good alternative may be to use something like Trainline or seek help from The Man in Seat 61. 

For a bit of a day jaunt my favourites would be out of Villena or Elda/Petrer (just different stops on the same line) on the conventional services. I usually use Petrer because you can park outside the station for free and it's closer to Pinoso but there's free parking to find in Villena too. You can go downhill towards Alicante and from Alicante you can go on to Elche, Murcia and Cartagena. After Alicante it's not a quick journey. 

There are, currently, three trains a day that go the full distance from Elda/Petrer or Villena up to Barcelona but there are lots of other trains that use parts of the same line and they're good for a day out. The journey up to Xativa or to Valencia is dead easy. It also used to be dead cheap but I've been a bit shocked by the prices I've noticed as I checked details for this post. Sometimes, to get the best prices, you need to book the tickets as singles because on a return ticket the outward and inward journey need to be on the same class of train. An easier option might be using trainline to make the booking though it will cost a few Euros more. If you go out of Petrer in the other direction, which means you'll go through Villena, you can go to Alcazar de San Juan which is a really interesting day excursion or to Campo de Criptana which is a very dull town except that it does have a lot of Don Quijote type windmills. The same train continues on to Ciudad Real - pleasant enough but hardly breathtaking - though the journey is so long that you'll need a thick book.

I was going to finish off with an old British Rail advertising slogan from the 1970s but then I remembered who did those ads so, not a word. My next thought was that there might be a Michael Portillo quote that would work. Then I realised that my ideas were leading me towards madness. So no clever signing off line.

Far, far away

I used to visit Spain as a tourist long before I lived here. Usually I'd just buy a plane ticket and then find a hotel/pension when I got to wherever. Travelling around was done by public transport. 

I've always liked trains. For tourists cast adrift in a foreign land, they have the big advantage, over buses, of going to stations that have name plaques. Provided you know the name of the place you're going then it's just a case of being able to read. Of course this is long before trains, trams and buses began to speak or you could GPS track your position.

Now Spain isn't bad at signing things but it isn't good either. Signs are apt to be missing when you most need them. Sometimes they are there but not obvious. They lurk. Not big enough. Not in your eyeline. Not right somehow. Once you get the hang of it they are more noticeable but that's when you don't need them. When you're in a hurry, flustered, weighed down by kilos of baggage etc., they never seem to be there.

So, I'm in Madrid, I decide to go to el Escorial for the day. I get off the train. The few people who get off at the same halt go both left and right at the station entrance. I have no idea which way it is to town. I chose badly. It was the same in Almeria and in countless other places. I sometimes walked miles in the wrong direction dragging my luggage (some genius had still to put wheels on suitcases) before finally getting somewhere central. 

Monóvar is a town about 15 minutes drive from Pinoso.You pass through it going from our house to the motorway. When we first moved here we passed what was obviously a railway station with a board outside that read Monóvar-Pinoso.  We presumed it was a rail line between the two towns. We asked around and were told there was no longer a railway line to Pinoso but that the station was still in use and that it was possible to catch a train from there to far away Bilbao in the Basque Country. It wasn't true. It was just the sort of dodgy information that we Britons provide to other Britons. It was simply the old, long closed, railway station in the town of Monóvar which had also served Pinoso in the forgotten past. In the same way that PG Wodehouse always used to have Lord Emsworth send someone from Blandings Castle to meet the train in Market Blandings there must have been taxis or carters moving people and goods between Pinoso and Monóvar.

Right then, after five or so paragraphs of round the houses, my point is that Spain has a habit of putting its train stations a fair way from the town centre and without any signs for luggage hauling pedestrians. Not always I should add. Alicante and Murcia, Madrid and Valencia, for example, all have central railway stations

Spain has had high speed trains for ages. After I'd been to the Expo in Seville in 1992 I caught the high speed train, the AVE, to Cordoba just to have a go. I was given a glass of sherry and a newspaper as I boarded by a young uniformed woman who I suspect had been chosen for reasons that would not now be acceptable. When the line from Albacete to Madrid opened at Christmas in 2010 we drove the 90 minutes to Albacete to catch the AVE to Cuenca just for the experience or 300km/h travel. As we arrived there were people on the approaches to the station to watch the train arrive. They were there because it was still novel. Mind you there's not much to do in Cuenca on a Sunday. The AVE station in Cuenca is miles from the town centre. The bus that joins the old Main Square to the station takes 24 minutes to complete its route.

It was the same when the line was extended from Madrid to Alicante. We were there to try it out. Our nearest AVE station is in Villena; the most underused station on the whole of the AVE network. When the route for the line was being decided one of the possibilities was that it would follow the traditional tracks which run right through the middle of Villena. The locals weren't for that. They wanted the lines to run underground so that they didn't have to wait at level crossing time after time. So Adif, the people who own the lines and stations and so on, saved themselves a shedload of cash and hassle by running the line through open country close to Villena. Now it takes about a quarter of an hour to drive to the station from the middle of Villena. I bet they wish the unused land option was open them in Murcia. In Murcia city there have been pitched battles between locals, opposed to the route chosen, and the police. The tracks are set to run through an economically challenged neighbourhood on the approach to the city.

Anyway. Only a couple of weeks ago the extension of the line from Alicante to Elche to Orihuela. that will finally continue to Murcia, was opened. I had to go to Elche yesterday because there was some recall on the software on my car (cars used to be recalled for problems with the brakes or fuel lines or some such but now it's software) so I thought I'd have a look at the new AVE station when I was there. Google maps got me there. The station is down a twisty track in a field in one of Elche's pedanias, called Matola. It's 8 kilometres from the town centre and the signs were few and far between, a bit like putting the bus station for Pinoso in Culebrón. 

Splendid as always

So I'd bought a couple of railway tickets to go up to Valencia for the Fallas.

Covid 19 meant first the Fallas were postponed and then there was a general restriction on movement. I wasn't going to be using my tickets.

RENFE, the train people, famed for their idiosyncratic website, emailed to say they were returning money or giving credit. They said I had to wait till today, Wednesday, for them to get their systems in place.

I tried the website first. It said my tickets had been "consumed" presumably because they were dated for yesterday.

I tried the special phone number. It offered a service in all the Spanish languages and in English. Splendid as my Castilian is, I went for the easy option. Lots of blurb and then the message - all our operators are busy. Press one if you would you like to be served in Castilian. I didn't press one.

I tried ringing back. All our operators are busy. Over the next thirty minutes I tried a few times more.

Eventually the synthesised voice didn't close me down straight away and went on to offer the language options. English was busy still, but would I like Castilian? This time I pressed option one.

The voice asked me about when my ticket was dated. I answered. The voice asked me about my ticket type. I answered. "All our operators are busy," said the voice.

I think I might wait a while. There are only 65€ worth of tickets and the pal I was going with has already paid his half. The way it's going I could spend more on phone calls than the ticket money I'll get back.

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I phoned several more times with similar sorts of result. On 25 March the web page message had changed and I was able to apply for a credit online. The credit came through today, 26th March

Confused for 80 seconds

Whilst I was shaving this morning, I heard a piece on the radio about changes to the rail service in Murcia. The National news has ten minute sections of local news every now and then. In the bathroom the local news comes from Murcia and in the kitchen the local news covers the Valencian Community. It's to do with signal strengths and because we are on the frontier between two regions.

RENFE, the train operator and ADIF, the rail infrastructure operator, have been in the news a lot lately. Over in Extremadura there was lots of fuss about really old diesel trains breaking down all the time and leaving people stranded for hours. The people of Extremadura complained that they live in a forgotten part of the country. In fact there has been a lot of grumbling, from several parts of Spain, that all the railway money is being poured into the glamorous high speed trains whilst the much more travelled commuter lines are being largely ignored. The story was rekindled a few days ago when, in Cataluña, there was a head on collision between two trains, leaving several people injured and one person dead. The trains looked like very old stock..

Back in Murcia the city is awaiting the arrival of the high speed train line out of Madrid. Over the last year or so, possibly longer, there have been a number of pitched battles, really violent confrontations, between people who live in the communities, that are about to be cut in half by the high speed lines, and the police. I have read articles that have suggested that vested interests are at work in suppressing reporting the number and severity of those confrontations.

Foamy faced I didn't quite catch the railway news but it sounded interesting. Like Sheldon Cooper I approve of trains and I like to use them. So I thought I'd check the story. I expected a quick, precision strike. Not so. First of all my search turned up lots of unrelated stories about the introduction of hybrid trains onto the line that currently joins Murcia to Madrid. These trains can change axle width (Spanish conventional gauge is wider than the standard European gauge used for the high speed lines) at Cuenca for the last part of the run into Madrid. They are hybrid because they have diesel as well as electrical drive for the non electrified parts of the route.

Thwarted by printed stories I had to go back and find the podcast of the news bulletin I'd half heard this morning and listen. I understood the words but I still didn't quite understand the story. In fact it turned out it was three pieces of rail news, affecting Murcia, reported as one

The first was about temporary cuts in the service between Murcia and Madrid because of the Variante de Camarillas. I thought I knew the word variante and I thought it meant variant. So what was Camarillas? The dictionary said it was a clique, a pressure group or band of people. I wondered if it were maybe some local agreement to do with the opposition to the new tracks. That didn't seem right though. Maybe it was a place then? The only Camarillas that Google maps knew was in Teruel. There was a street in Murcia called Camarillas Reservoir Street and that was the clue. I found the reservoir on the map. I also discovered that variante can mean detour. The Variante de Camarillas is a new stretch of rail that cuts off a corner in the current route between Murcia and Madrid. It runs from Cieza to Agramón (a place I've never heard of) and means that the line to Calasparra will become just a local line. Crikey. What a lot of work for such a simple story.

The second story was that there were going to be closures on the line between Murcia and Alicante. Again part of the difficulty was that there was a place name involved, another place I'd never heard of; Reguerón. It's a district of Murcia city. That story was about was closing the current line whilst a couple of stretches of new track were joined up.

The third piece took no working out. Another place, but this time they described the name, Trepía, as a village near Lorca. It was about protests demanding the  building bridges instead of level crossings on the new line.

Just 80 seconds of news bulletin which I would have understood perfectly if I'd known two place names and how to say spur line in Spanish. Or which I would never have heard if I'd shaved faster and got into the kitchen for the local news spot!

Red Nacional de los Ferrocarriles Españoles

Maggie saw a news item on the telly that said that for the "puente", the long weekend, that stretches from Constitution day on Wednesday through Immaculate Conception on Friday, was pretty well booked up everywhere in Spain except in Cataluña. We supposed that was because of the political goings on there, because of the terrorist attack and because the good people of Barcelona have made it very clear how much they like tourists. The result was that there were lots of good deals to be had.

We decided to go. We travelled on the train. We go on trains fairly regularly in the sense that we go on them from time to time rather than never - maybe two, three or four times a year. Well actually maybe four, six or eight times a year in that we usually go there and back. ADIF is the state owned company that owns the Spanish railway infrastructure but it's RENFE (Red Nacional de los Ferrocarriles Españoles) that runs the trains. Our local stations are in Villena and Elda for conventional trains and at a different station in Villena for the high speed stuff.

We went from the railway station in Elda or maybe in Petrer. The station is called Elda-Petrer. It's just down from Elda hospital but, if I were guessing, I would have plumped for the station being in Petrer. The paired towns of Petrer and Elda are our nearest decent sized urban area. Despite living here for years I still have no idea where the frontier between the two towns runs. There are advantages to this paired town urban area though as we get access to twice as many fiestas, fairs and events using more or less the same parking spot.

Anyway the round trip cost 79.80€ or a few pence over £70 with the distance being just short of 500kms in each direction. I tried to compare prices between our trip and the one between Euston and Carlisle (480kms) but the British price seemed to depend on a great number of variables. The British website looked like one of those that would spring last minute charges (for booking a seat for instance) but, presuming it doesn't, and supposing that the suspiciously cheap £84 train (sandwiched between one at £130 and another at £115) actually exists, then the British price is just a little under two and a half times as expensive as the Spanish price for a similar distance.

On the outward journey the train was on time - well two minutes late to be honest, the coffee was overpriced at 2.20€, the train was clean, the assigned seat was comfortable with plenty of leg room, though, on the way home, our reserved seat turned out to be round a table and that was less comfortable. Bumping knees from time to time. But, all in all it was a very acceptable journey with RENFE doing a decent job as they so often have for us in the past.

Actually the only thing that lets RENFE down is their clonking website which falls over quite a lot and offers very limited route planning facility. If it were possible to decide where we could travel to on the trains we may actually use them more often than we do.

Trains, culture and city life

I had a lot of trouble getting a job when I was a young man. One day in the 70s after another disastrous interview I was on the milk train back from London to Halifax. It was early morning when the train made an unscheduled stop in my home town of Elland presumably waiting for the signals or somesuch. Beeching had done for Elland as an official stop. I jumped out of the train (no conductor controlled doors in those days) and despite the protestations of the British Rail staff legged it over the semi derelict platforms and pushed through a hole in the wire that I knew from my boyhood adventures. It saved me the four mile hike back from the official stop in Halifax.

Yesterday we decided to travel to Valencia for one last outing before I go back to work on Monday. We agreed to use  the train. Quite by chance we'd been in the station at Villena a couple of days before. That's where I got the idea. It was interesting looking at the routes of the slower trains that run on the wider traditional gauge of Spanish railways. The train we got from Elda for instance had come from Cartagena and had passed through Murcia, Elche and Alicante. From Elda/Petrer it went on to Villena, Xátiva, Valencia and then up through Teruel and on to Zaragoza. Plenty of interesting stops there, Plenty of places that I had never thought of as train destinations. As well as our route there was another that went up to Barcelona and a third went through Castilla La Mancha taking in Campo de Criptana (one of the places with lots of white windmills) on its way to Ciudad Real - a town I haven't visited for years.

One of the reasons that the very fast Spanish AVE trains cover the ground so quickly is not just because they can travel at over 300 kph but because they don't stop. Between Alicante and Madrid for instance, a distance of just over 420kms, they stop just twice to keep the time to around two hours and ten minutes. It adds fifteen minutes to put in another couple of stops. I think I've got used to thinking of trains as long distance services rather than considering their routes through lots of interesting towns.

Spanish trains are usually clean and prompt and generally it's allocated seats too. So even if there are suitcases all over the place on the crowded routes you still get a seat. Prices seem reasonable to me. The 290km round trip cost 31€ for full price tickets or a tad under 25 quid. Covering the 450 kms from Madrid to Cartagena in January of this year on a special ticket (no passes or cards - just an offer) cost me 15€.

So we got off the train into the modernist Estación del Norte built in 1917 and we were plunged into Valencia city. There were back packer type tourists everywhere, a variation on the tourist families of the Costa Blanca, and lots of lots of ordinary people just going about their lives. Valencia is the third largest city in Spain and even on a Saturday it was obvious that we were a long way from Culebrón.

I always like to take in an exhibition when I'm in a town. To be honest I'm not a good gallery goer. I soon get bored of looking at pictures or sculptures or installations or whatever but I just love going to galleries. Places full of ideas, the effervescence of human endeavour. Maggie suggested the Cathedral. That sounded good to me too as it's years since I've been inside. The entrance price (wasn't there a story about Jesus and people doing business in a temple?) included a surprisingly interesting audio guide despite lots of references to polychrome figures and retables. And, unlike the Monty Python crowd we didn't have any trouble finding the Holy Grail. It's stop 20 on the audio guide.

We got to a gallery too, though they are always termed museums in Spanish, with the IVAM, the Valencia Institute of Modern Art. To get there we wandered through the bohemian Barrio Carmen which is full of bars, eateries, antique clothes shops and bike hire places. We even found time to down a jug of Agua de Valencia, a sparkling wine, orange juice, gin and vodka combo before heading back to a Talgo train to whip us back to Petrer and the waiting Mini.