Madrid: a nightmare in two acts and a prologue
Prologue:
Our lunchtime concert in Madrid, at the Fundación Juan March was schedule initially for 2020, but postponed twice. But this year, it really did take place. Because of our no-fly policy, this journey was always going to present travel challenges, being either a very long drive, or a quite long train ride.
In 2021, we were able to organise both a concert in northern France, and one in Pamplona, which would have made driving feasible. But we lost the Pamplona date for 2022; so we decided to drive to France, and take the train from there after the concert.
We were fortunate to know an English amateur viol player, who owns a large and magnificent chateau near Amiens, and he organised a concert for friends and neighbours. The journey there was smooth and uneventful - French autoroutes are the best in the world - and the concert went well. We were well fed and looked after, occupying just a few of the twenty or so bedrooms.
Act I:
The next morning, we left early, parked the cars in the multi-story car park adjacent to Amiens stations (my principal worry was about this arrangement - which turned out to be the easiest bit of the journey), and got on the train to Paris - which resolutely didn’t leave the station. Then it did, only to stop again at the next one, a few minutes outside Amiens. We had to go from the Gare du Nord to the Gare de Lyons when we arrived in Paris, so we tried to calculate the latest time we could arrive before missing our train south. It became clear we weren’t going to make it.
When we made it to the Gare de Lyons, we were there with about three-quarters of the population of Paris. The queue to get to tickets desks was about 40 metres long; so we tried to buy new tickets online for the next train to Barcelona. All trains were full. Despair. What to do? Go back to Amiens and drive? Fly, after all? Walk?
We decided to join the queue and see what happened. This is where I learned a new French phrase: ‘rupture de connections’. Our connection had certainly been ruptured, so I was eligible for an interview with an extremely competent woman, who found us places on a train to Valence and thence to Barcelona. Hooray.
On arriving in Barcelona, however, the RENFE people were not so helpful. We had, of course, missed the train we were booked on, but there was no question of them finding seats for us. We had to buy new tickets. There were two possible trains, 2000 and 2045. The first ticket desk we approached said we were too late for the 2000 and there were no seats on the 2045. We tried again at another desk, to find that, actually, we could get on the 2000 but the tickets had to be 1st class, and we had to hurry. I booked the tickets and urged the others to meet me at the platform. I ran to the train, but we somehow missed each other - I was shooed onto the train, thinking the others were already on it. But they weren’t. In the end, they were able to get tickets on the 2045 and so we all made it to Madrid at around midnight.
Entr’act
The following day, the rehearsal was at 0900 and concert at 1200. Sam’s wife and family, who were in Madrid, booked a lovely restaurant for after the concert, and the return journey, starting at 1730 seemed trouble-free. The concert hall was beautiful, and the concert went very well - a full house and a very appreciative audience. The lunch was wonderful, and much needed after the two sandwiches that we had managed the previous day. We took an Uber to the station, and all seemed well….
Act II
until we arrived at Barcelona station. The sight of long queues, and generally speaking about a million people in the station were the warning signs. The train board said something Google translated all ‘All trains to Barcelona cancelled’. Aaaarrgh - surely it couldn’t happen again? Of course it could. Emily & Jo went to see about hiring a car, while I stayed in the queue. Eventually, someone emerged to say that there would in fact be trains to Barcelona tonight, but they would take 2 hours longer than planned. We waited, then went to the platform. The train was said to leave at 2030; so we thought to get a coffee and wait. No sooner had we sat down than some kind soul asked if we were going to Barcelona, because there was a train leaving right now. Up we jumped, onto the train. We arrived around midnight.
In the morning our train for Paris was at 0900. We arrived in good time, to find another enormous queue and news that the train would be an hour late.
While we caught up some of the time, we were still 50 minutes late getting into Paris, and had missed our connection back to Amiens, where the cars were - remember? - but there was a train and for the first time it was on time. We picked up the cars, and drove to Calais and all arrived home before 1am the next morning.
From this long and possibly tedious story, we can draw some conclusions:
Air travel is the fastest, cheapest and most convenient form of travel. These are powerful incentives for people to prefer it to other forms.
But it is cheapest only because it pays almost none of the real costs of the damage it does to the environment. Jet fuel is the only form of fossil fuel that isn’t taxed.
Train travel in UK & Europe is massively underfunded and a direct subsidy is needed from air to rail to improve infrastructure. For example, all the trains we travelled on were full or near to full; had there been two or three times as many trains, then more people could travel in greater comfort.
For us, travelling by car will be favourite. It allows us to be flexible and to offer performances in places we would otherwise never go.
Travelling by electric car is also cheaper even than flying.
