...stay mainly in the rail yard—or on the drawing board.It boggles the mind to think that the inaugural service of France's train à grande vitesse (TGV), between Paris and Lyon, occurred all of 25 years ago while Spain is still struggling to complete its own humble high-speed line, AVE (for 'Alta Velocidad Española'), from Madrid to Barcelona. We're talking a difference of one QUARTER OF A CENTURY! And Spaniards wonder why the rest of Europe looks down on them culturally, culinarily, and technologically.
Despite the hundreds of millions of Euros directed Spain's way (mostly from Germany and Scandinavia) since its inclusion into the Euro zone circa 2002, the only thing these high profile infrastructure projects seem to have produced are a windfall of low-paying construction jobs for the 650,000 recently amnestied immigrants (Morocco, Ecuador, Colombia, Romania mostly) and an over-heated economy on the verge of bust.
One 'great' writer, food fit only for prison inmates (or drunk-out-of-their-minds British holiday goers who regularly storm the streets of The Great Enchantress in a Sangria sweetened riff on poverty tourism) and decades to build a high-speed train line? Mystery solved.
And even if high hopes for their high-speed nexus were dashed in recent weeks, the litany of ferrocarril setbacks since the AVE news continued to come at bullet speed:
1) Tunnel implodes in the residential neighborhood of Carmel last April, setting back construction schedule for years (not to mention destroying homes and dislocating hundreds of residents)
2) AVE line arrives, with great fanfare, to within 143 kilometers (about 90 miles) of Barcelona's SANTS train station. No word on when the final bits of rail line will be in place. So for now, despite all the self-congratulation, the only way to get from Barcelona to Madrid in under 5 1/2 hours is, I guess, to take a taxi to Les Borges Blanques (Lleida)!
3) Just a few days later, the AVE geniuses acknowledge that their timetable for connecting the line to Girona and on to the French border was wildly overoptimistic. Instead of a 2009 targeted completion date, they are now talking 2012!! They overestimated the pace of construction by 3 years? Only in Spain. (Well, perhaps also Italy. But at least Italy has compensating virtues.)
4) Alarms bells sound again as Sagrada Familia boosters warn that the planned AVE line, which was to pass underground within a few blocks of the garish and never completed Gaudí cathedral, threatened to disrupt the integrity of structure's foundation and, alas, precipitate yet another grand implosion. So now all AVE routes out of the city are back on the drawing board (and subject to furious and politically charged infighting).
5) Thursday (vernal solstice) it was announced that the #4 (yellow) metro line was to be shut down because of menacing vibrations within one of the tunnels. So service from basically La Ciutadella to Besòs Mar is to be suspended indefinitely. (But how will we all get to the indispensable Fòrum now?)
6) Some hot r
odding yahoos apparently monkeying around with the prototype EuroMed fast train on Friday (22-June) got the thing going 120 km/hr on a track designed for top speeds of 30. Inevitable outcome? Colossal derailment just outside the El Prat airport and delays, service suspensions, huge highway backups for all of Friday and running into the famed Sant Joan weekend. Check out the Saturday edition of El Periódico for a taste of the ire and blame gaming.7) Not even I would venture to guess what incompetence will befall the Barcelona railways next.
