A relic of the past

I don’t have much need to use Renfe’s Ro­dalies - or local train ser­vice - due to the fact that I sel­dom ven­ture far out of Barcelona. For that I am thank­ful, given the con­stant prob­lems the sys­tem suf­fers thanks to a “chronic lack of in­vest­ment” as one Punt Avui ar­ti­cle put it just two short months ago. By way of ex­am­ple, “trains on the R3 line take the same time to reach their des­ti­na­tion, or longer, as 100 years ago”. Said ar­ti­cle goes on to men­tion “sys­tem­atic fail­ures to com­ply with ac­cords by the Min­istry of Pub­lic Works, such as the 2008-2015 com­muter in­fra­struc­ture plan, which pro­vided for an in­vest­ment of €4 bil­lion, but was never im­ple­mented. An in­tol­er­a­ble and in­ad­mis­si­ble sit­u­a­tion that en­tails se­ri­ous mo­bil­ity prob­lems, pre­car­i­ous sta­tions and ac­ci­dents”.

Well thank­fully my re­cent ex­pe­ri­ence didn’t in­volve any of the above, merely frus­tra­tion at a com­plete and utter lack of re­li­able in­for­ma­tion. It turns out you have to be ex­tremely fa­mil­iar with the ser­vice if you want to get the right train to where you’re going. In my case, I was going to Cer­dany­ola del Vallés, a jour­ney of some 20 min­utes and eight stops from Plaça Catalunya in the heart of Barcelona, and a place I’d strangely never been to in all my years in Cat­alo­nia.

My travel com­pan­ion and I con­sulted two sep­a­rate apps to find out which train to take, and they both co­in­cided on it being the R4 to ei­ther Ter­rassa or Man­resa. But they didn’t co­in­cide on what time the train might be. “No prob­lem,” I thought, “that in­for­ma­tion will be eas­ily avail­able at the sta­tion”. Ha. Ar­riv­ing at Plaça Catalunya, the de­par­ture boards listed nu­mer­ous trains every few min­utes, but none said R4 to Ter­rassa or Man­resa, and cer­tainly not at the times the two apps had said. “No prob­lem,” I thought, “I’ll ask one of the staff”. Ha. I ap­proached a Renfe em­ployee and he con­firmed, “next one to Ter­rassa or Man­resa”. “Which is when?” I asked, “as there isn’t one on the board”. “Soon,” came the reply, “You’d bet­ter get down to the plat­form”.

Heed­ing his warn­ing, we headed for Plat­form 1, but when we ar­rived there was still no sign of a train to Ter­rassa or Man­resa. So I thought I’d ask a se­cu­rity guard. “Do you know about the trains?” “A lit­tle,” she replied. “We’ve been told to get the R4 to Ter­rassa or Man­resa but there doesn’t ap­pear to be one...” as my words tailed off and we looked at the board, an R4 to Ter­rassa oblig­ingly popped up at the bot­tom of the screen. “Yes, there is,” she said help­fully, “right there, in nine min­utes”. I nod­ded be­fore re­join­ing my travel com­pan­ion and ul­ti­mately tak­ing that train, de­spite there being no in­for­ma­tion on the screen to sug­gest it might stop at Cer­dany­ola.

So why this seem­ingly triv­ial anec­dote? Be­cause I have lived here for 25 years and I found it dif­fi­cult to get the right in­for­ma­tion about a train that went 8 stops in 20 min­utes. I can’t imag­ine what mess a tourist might get into try­ing to do the same trip, and I may be doing them a dis­ser­vice, but from their com­mu­ni­ca­tion with me I have strong doubts about whether the mem­ber of the Renfe staff or se­cu­rity guard would have been able to com­mu­ni­cate in Eng­lish had the need arisen.

My point then? That in ad­di­tion to all the other com­plaints aimed at the Ro­dalies ser­vice re­gard­ing a lack of in­vest­ment in in­fra­struc­ture, there also seems to be a gap­ing hole in the pro­vi­sion of basic in­for­ma­tion for pas­sen­gers. To get the train back we had to con­sult one of those - what do you call them? - oh yes, train timeta­bles on the wall of the sta­tion. Just as I used to do in the 1980s.

opin­ion