This summer I picked up a friend who was arriving from Madrid by train at the Cáceres railway station. He had taken an AVE from Zaragoza to link at the Atocha station and get to Extremadura. When he got off in the capital of Cáceres, after more than four hours of travel and with the consequent delay because he does not know what reason, nor did he greet me; only one question came out of his mouth: but how can you bear this?
It is not that he has no affection for me. But his anger was more than justified: he had gone from an hour and a half on the AVE ‘Zaragoza-Madrid’ to more than four on a diesel train without a computer plug, of course without Wi-Fi, without a coffee machine or of drinks, without a proper bathroom, with numerous shutdowns and, worst of all, with the air conditioning running at times in an August where it exceeded 40º.
There are those who say that Extremadura has now been hit by the train when, in reality, it has been going on for a long time, that the partisan struggle has gotten in the way and that there are political interests in a contest that, in reality, is artificial. I do not doubt that there are no false or spurious reasons in some of the parts, or in all of them, but what is certain is that this situation cannot continue like this any longer, that the train was bad until now, but a few months here we fall to chunks.
Times have improved for everyone except for the usual ones and whoever goes out, who fortunately we are almost all, can see what they have out there and compare it with what we unfortunately have here. We took the rest for the AVE since we won the lottery in that famous Spanish-Figueira da Foz summit of 2003 when Spain and Portugal agreed on the Iberian high speed, but 14 years later we continued with the AVE in works (and we will see for when) and with the conventional train made foxes.
