My father was a train geek, to use a word he didn't know and which I don't know if current train lovers like. He liked trains so much that, when he talked about the subject, his voice would become dark and transcendent. In the garage he had a model, built by himself, made of fruit boxes and cardboard covered with sacks (the animal grain sacks) and, in turn, covered with plaster, and then painted. He built mountains, streams and small trees and, in the middle, the tracks. I remember the brand of the trains: Märklin. Not all the trains and wagons he bought maintained the proportions. I have not inherited this passion, but I see it around me. Why are there so many people who adore trains? It doesn't happen with other public transports, like planes, boats, buses. It's trains.
I have never been to the Rodalies operations center and I think about how much my father would have liked to see it. How much he would have liked to be a train driver (he always said so). What will it be like? Who is there, in front of the computer, when a breakdown occurs? I call Antonio Carmona, whom all journalists know, because he is Renfe's Communication Delegate in Catalonia. He is the one who always strives to make this transport system, which we suffer and criticize daily, pleasant for us. "Don't have breakfast," he tells me on the phone, "we're going to a tortilla place you'll like." Tortillas seem to me one of the most important inventions of civilization, so I save some space.
We meet early in the morning at Estación de França. Protocol. ID card, visitor's pass to enter, because we are going to the offices. "All this belongs to Adif," Antonio tells me. "We are renting, in inverted commas. It's like Iberia with Aena." We go up to a grand room with a giant black screen. "It's the one that controls all traffic."
He introduces me to the head of the Rodalies management center, Luciano Troya. "Yes, from here," he emphasizes, "we maintain control." I understand that he is the one who decides what to do when what we call "an incident" occurs. He smiles and explains: "For example, if the line between Vilanova and Sitges has to be cut because there has been an accident. We do all this with Copernicus, our program."
"Breakdown in Castellbisbal," I hear someone say. And Luciano tells me: "A train has stopped in Castellbisbal. It wasn't ours. Ours, the 25015, had to change tracks. It seems someone pulled the alarm, the train stopped, and the driver had to go. Ten minutes stopped. If this were to happen in Plaza Catalunya, it would affect you much more, because all trains pass through there. There are times of day when we have twenty trains per hour. Peak hour? Nine o'clock. We have two tunnels to divert when there's an incident. And why are there delays? For many reasons. Let's imagine there's an incident in the morning and it's resolved a few hours later, but the driver's shift is already over. We have about 600 drivers, 15% of whom are women. Think about it, we have a 94% punctuality rate. I know that's not your perception. The works at Sants have helped us a lot with punctuality. Sometimes incidents are delicate. For example, run-overs..."
This is the word we sometimes hear in the news. "We never call them suicides, never. First of all, because we can't know for sure, and then, for the family... We always call it a run-over. There's one run-over per week, yes. So, when such a tragedy happens... Let's say it's at eight in the morning. What do we do? Do we look for buses? No, because we have all the inbound traffic to schools. The forensic doctor might take three hours to remove the body...". I look at Antonio. I ask him if they have psychologists for the drivers. Yes, they do.
"We never call them suicides, never. First of all, because we can't know for sure, and then, for the family... We always call it a run-over. There's one run-over per week, yes," explains the head of the Rodalies management center, Luciano Troya"Trains are checked every 15 days. There are different levels of maintenance. Agrafitti, for example, is not the same as a breakdown. We spend eight million euros a year cleaning graffiti. Now, for example, they've taken to breaking windows. They take the interior hammer and break the windows.Before the pandemic, we moved 450,000 travelers. Now, half.We have recovered 65%. It will take time to get back to where we were. We have noticed curious things. For example, the R1, the Maresme line, had the same number of passengers during the year as in summer. And this is because tourists always go down to Barcelona for a day or two. Cloudy day? To Barcelona!".
We say goodbye. "It's true that we see a lot of the railway hobby," says Antonio as we go out into the street to catch a taxi. "On Twitter, especially. There are people who know more about trains than I do. Now, in El Clot, I'll introduce you to the social media manager, who will tell you about these things. How is the service we provide? It's not as good as we'd like, but it's not as bad as they say!".
El Clot is a station I hadn't set foot in for a long time, and that's where the C.T.C., the Centralized Traffic Control, is located. It's a fascinating place, with all the workers in front of a gigantic screen. Antonio introduces me to Xavi Canalejas, who is the head of the center, and, he certainly is, a train fanatic. "Mine is inexplicable," he tells me, laughing. "As a child, in Cunit, when I went to the beach, I would stand on the bridge and wait until the train passed...". I smile, thinking of my father. He had told me how fascinated he was by the changing of the tram trolleys. "Today is a fantastic day, everything is going well," Xavi exclaims. "Otherwise, the mobiles and landlines start ringing."
The girl in charge of social media, Carlota Alajarín, nods her head. "Normally, now, when there's an incident, passengers tweet about it," she tells me. "Our phrase, the one we say every day is, Is there noise?, the tweeter helps us. If we see that they say, for example, that the escalator in such a place isn't working...". Antonio gives me an example: "If we compare it to Correos... On Twitter, you don't comment that a letter you were expecting hasn't arrived. But you do comment that the train you have to catch is late." And Carlota, answering my question, adds: "On a normal day, we have about a hundred tweets that mention us. Complaints, explanations... We have a user, Bruce Dylan, @Dani_the_boss, who comments on things every day."
"We eagerly await the promised infrastructures," Xavi tells me. "We are inaugurating things... Think that, of course, we cannot mount a train on a sidewalk, as if it were a coach. We have five schedule models. The one for weekdays, the one for holidays... We have a space and we have a time, and we have to square it. A thousand trains and conditions galore. The famous single tracks that all of Catalonia knows, for example."
It's breakfast time, so we go to the promised bar: the Clot Aragón bar, at the station. A small and simple place with an enormous, immoral, wonderful amount of tortillas of all kinds. Potato, eggplant, chorizo, potato with date and leek... Beer, bread with tomato and all kinds of pinchos. While we have our particular feast, Ricard Riol, who is an operations technician at Clot, comes to see us. "Jose, the one at the bar, is already here at three in the morning," he tells me. "The bread is brought from the oven next door. And at five he already opens the door for people. When you enter through the door you already smell it. With all the cataclac he suffered a lot, of course. He has, above all, local customers."
Don't miss this small bar, hidden in the basements of the city. Next to the trains.