I’ve been a passenger rail fan at since grade school,
when I traveled overnight from Portland to Glacier Park on Amtrak, and my fascination increased in college when I
took the train to and from Chicago a number of times. After graduating I rode my
first European train and came away amazed how it blew Amtrak away.
Before this teaching assignment I’d never ridden
the Spain's AVE (Alta Velocidad Española) trains, which are among the premier
European trains that travel at least 150 mph.
Spain is an interesting story on that front – before the
1990s its trains were considered some of the worst in Europe, but now they’re
among the best.
The first high-speed link connected Madrid with Sevilla in
1992, to coincide with Sevilla’s Expo 92
that year – and attracted no little controversy: detractors called it a train to nowhere (or
worse, a train to Africa), and many noted that it seemed curious that Felipe
González,
the Prime Minister at the time, hailed from Sevilla. . .
High-speed rail reached Barcelona in 2008, with a Madrid
connection which has proven so popular that one airline has seen its traffic
drop between the two cities by half.
The network has grown and today Barcelona has high-speed
connections with several major cities around the country, so my first decision
was where to go? A link to Provence in France won’t go into service until this
summer, but there is excellent service to Madrid as well as Malaga, Grenada,
Cordoba, and Sevilla in Andalusia – which is Spain’s southern-most region and home
to what most Americans associate with the country such as bullfighting,
flamenco, and astonishing Moorish architecture. (All three are scarce in up in
far northern Barcelona, where bullfighting is now even illegal!)
Sevilla and Córdoba made a convenient pair to visit
and both offer amazing sights indeed, such as Sevilla’s Cathedral (third-largest in Europe and home to what the
locals insist is Columbus’s tomb) and its Alcázar palace (where Ferdinand and
Isabella entertained Columbus); and Córdoba’s Cathedral, or Mezquita, is an
iconic forest of arches – one of the best-known images of Spain -- that was
originally a Visigothic church, then a mosque, and then from the 1500s a church
again.
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| Cordoba's remarkable, iconic Mezquita |
Spain’s national rail company RENFE operates all AVE trains,
which all require reservations. You can get these at rail stations, from travel
agencies (Spain’s El Corte Ingles department stores all have them), or online.
Many sources warn that RENFE’s own website www.RENFE.com
is less than user-friendly and has a tradition of not accepting U.S. credit
cards, so I was hesitant to use it -- but apparently the site has been upgraded
lately because I found that, with a bit of effort, I was able to reserve everything
and pay online (although as an Apple user I discovered the site likes Chrome or
Foxfire way better than Safari).
The site has an English-language option that worked fine,
although there were a few places that didn’t translate so I had to improvise.
If you don’t enjoy that sort of thrill there’s also an easy-to-use U.S. website
www.petrabax.com that’s directly
connected to RENFE, but it adds a small surcharge and when I checked it did not
allow same-day or next-day reservations.
If you have a printer RENFE’s website lets you print your
own boarding pass; if not it issues you a six-letter code allowing you to print
one at the station. I went this route and it worked flawlessly.
All AVE trains use Barcelona’s Sants station, which is
user-friendly and has been recently renovated, but I found it a bit of a
letdown – part of the fun of European train travel is the busteling 19th
Century iron latticework complexes like Paris’s Gare du Nord or London’s Victoria
Station. Sants though was built in the 1970s and looks it: a big, stark
rectangular building with all tracks below – sort of like a cleaner,
easier-to-use version of New York’s Penn Station.
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| Main entrance to Barcelona's Sants Railroad Station |
(Modern rail stations don’t have to be boring: Rome’s Termini
is about the same vintage as Sants but it maintains the vibe and romance a Euro
rail station ought to have, but I digress.)
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| So where shall we go? Sants Station's arrivals/departures board |
My aesthetic issues aside, Sants station did accomplish its
main purpose: getting to my train was easy and straightforward. As
with airline travel you check in and put your bag through a scanner, but this version was way less intimidating and smoother than any airport security I’ve
encountered. There is a big electronic sign in the middle of the station indicating which platform your
train will use, and getting to the right one was no problem. Your ticket
indicates your car and seat number, and the AVE cars have very well-marked,
easy-to-find electronic signs so getting to where I belonged was a snap.
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| My AVE awaits (in Sevilla's Santa Justa Station) |
all photos by Pat Casey
Coming in Part 2: the actual ride
Sources:
Rick Steves, Spain
2013, Avalon Books, 2013
