Today I traveled to ‘the capital’ to do things in the morning.
The first train I can take leaves my town at around 8 a.m. and the second at around 8:30 a.m.. The next one is between one and two in the afternoon. So to do ‘office’ things I can only get it that early. I usually have to make time until they open the shops I need, about 10 a.m.
That leaves me only two hours until I need to start leaving if I want to take the second train from the big city to my village at around one in the afternoon – the first one is at around eight in the morning, so it does not apply to me.
So if I need do things that take longer than two hours or I do not want to hurry and worry from 12 o’clock (the train station is at a distance from the center of the city that only benefits the taxi driver guild), I have to stay in the city for lunch and catch the five o’clock train back.
Today I reserve my ticket for the 16:55p.m. train.
At 16:45 I arrive at the station and the information panel says that the my train is expected to arrive at 19:35. From time to time, the megaphone remembers this fact without any further development.
At 17:38, without any notice by megaphone, the panel shows that my train is expected to arrive at 17:42. At 17:40 the megaphone announces that my train is on track 1. It is a notice usually given one or two minutes before the train arrives. At 17:41, without any train arriving on any track, it is reported by megaphone that my train is on track 1 and is about to leave. At 17:42 the megaphone announces that my train “is going to make its departure.” But there’s no train that can make anything, departure or otherwise. At 17:43 a train enters on track 1, but this is a freight train. Tens of empty carriages. No more trains.
My train has disappeared from the information panels when I stop looking at the empty track.
At around 18:00 I go to the renfe office. In this office there are two entrances: ticket sales and information. I’m not buying a ticket, so I’m get in through the information entrance.
The information counter is empty, but the man at the sales counter only has to move his chair half a metre to attend to me since there is no separation in his space. There is another employee at the same sales counter and several groups waiting for their turn.
The gentleman at the counter – from now on I will call him the male renfe employee – tells me that “for renfe [queriees] you enter through the other side.” I tell him I just want information, not to buy a ticket, which is what about five groups of people are queueing and waiting for. The renfe employee ignores me and keeps serving people who want to buy tickets.
I leave the office with my bike, I enter it again through the other entrance to arrive to basically the same counter, this time having to request a paper ticket that tells me which is my turn, and a lady in the queue comments her case and so I find out that she also wants to know what happened with the train that has disappeared from the panels, although she is traveling to another big city, not a town like me.
When it it is finally the lady’s turn, we both approach the counter since it is the same question. What happened to the missing train. The male renfe employee asks us to wait and when he comes back he tells us he called, but the line is engaged. I comment that most probably they are calling from all the localities where the train in question is – was – expected – and he nods.
After a while the renfe employee tells us that the train has been canceled, that another train will be traveling in the same direction within an hour, he believes, but that I will not be allowed to get on that train with my bike, and that I will have to wait for the last train of the day that stops in my town, about ten o’clock.
He gets on the phone to find out more. With the headphone on his ear, she asks the other lady and me where we are going. “It’s only two travelers, but one goes with a bike.” The other lady tells her that she’s with her husband who’s been taking care of her bags, so we’re 3.
When he hangs up he tells me that the train on which the other lady and her husband can get on doesn’t even stop in my village, so bike or no bike, I am not getting on that train. I have nothing left but to wait until ten o’clock.
Not an apology, not a minimum show of empathy. And as I have seen similar situations, I explain to the other lady, in the face of the silence of the two renfe employees at the counter, that as we have a pass and we have not paid for this ticket specifically / in particular, we do not even have the right to any refund. I do not need to tell her that we don’t deserve an apology either; I do need to tell her that as customers, as we are no longer travelers, we are customers, whether we buy individual tickets or passes, we don’t deserve the slightest respect, asa renfe is demonstrating with every breakdown and every delay.
The frustrating thing is the effort already made by someone who has a car, not to take it, instead becoming dependent on 4 trains in a whole day. The frustrating thing is that this is not worth it, that it seems that while ‘higher up’ ‘command’ have tried to put this idea of passes into practice so that we use public transport, ‘medium management?’ or ‘more intermediate hands’ people are having an overwhelming success pushing people back to travel by car.
Thank you, RENFE, thank you ADIF, before you have such a nasty ball, thank you both.
And this, friends, is what happens when the parties taking power in turns, agree to the fragmentation and gradual privatization of what in its day was a public railway company.
I don’t know what compensation is possible if there’s no money compensation. No one returns me the French lesson I missed, nor the union meeting that I missed, nor the meeting with friends I missed, nor any of the rest of hours that renfe has stolen from me, nor the dignity the employee in Burgos station stole from me when he laughed at me.
I don’t know how a mistreatment is compensated by a company that is supposed to provide a public service.
