The trains affected by the damage to the Gavà painting have returned to normal this Saturday, but they are at stake on Monday, when the workers travel
Three weeks later, the lines of Rodalies affected by the breakdown in the Gavà signal box have returned to normal. A bad day to celebrate because tonight has once again been a nightmare for some network users in Tarragona, who have been trapped for hours by another incident. Between Barcelona and CastelldefelsHowever, the trains have run normally and the citizens who have wanted to get into the city or escape from it in search of a cloudy day at the beach have done so without the slightest mishap.
As the yard is, meet Hernan Parral and of Renata Santana, an Argentine couple migrated to Spain fleeing the impoverishment that has been imposed in Messi’s country, is not bad. His is not a popular point of view, nor is it a majority one. But he allows himself to distance himself, to admit that everything is relative.
A history of Argentine trains
Hernán loves trains. For Renata they are just a means of transportation but for Hernán they are a “way of life”. As a child he collected model trains and as soon as he could he started working in the Argentine railway network. First, as a ‘connector’, joining wagons. Later, as a shipbuilder, sewing the cars that would make up each train. Then he stepped into the cockpit, from “foguista”, a word that is used in Argentina to refer to the co-pilot and that comes from the past of steam engines when what that figure did was throw coal. And finally, as a driver.
In the Historical Train, a tourist convoy that covered the route Federico Lacrose-Fatima, Hernán met Renata, in 1995. Renata went to the attraction invited by a friend, Hernán worked there. They had two children and in 2020, after the pandemic, tired of being trapped, they flew to Barcelona, to the Collblanc neighborhood of L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, to be exact. From there, both take, at different times due to family reconciliation, the metro to Sants and the Rodalies train to viladecans. On holidays, they also travel by train, a transport that they take seven days a week. Few users have a history more linked to trains than them, past and present.
His perspective is not that of the Catalan loaded with reasons to be angry with his train network, it is that of some Argentines who have suffered the Argentine reality and who, upon stepping foot in Spain, have taken a greater leap than the one a Barcelonan would take in Zurich, massaged for the punctuality of Swiss public transport. “There are incidents and there are things that need to be improved,” admits Hernán, listing mechanical failures and the state of the tracks that he recognizes from his experience, “but compared to Argentina they have formidable trains,” he warns, aware that the comparison can offend because the transport of his country “is 80 years distant from the Spanish”. “To travel 1,000 kilometers it can take two and a half days in Argentina. Trains cannot travel at more than 30 km/h,” says Hernán.
It happens as with “inflation”, reflects Renata: “It is true that there is price inflation here but if you compare it with the rise that there is every day in Argentina…”, and does not finish the sentence.
Friendly match
Along with the Argentine couple, on the train that EL PERIÓDICO has taken to update the thermometer that normality has been restored in this Rodalies structure, the most suffered users of transport are not there either, those who need it to go to work and those who suffer from anxiety attacks when a convoy slows down and sense that they will have to explain themselves to the boss, or be late for a meeting, or cancel an interview. Those on this Saturday, at 10:00 a.m., are travelers who move at the speed of Saturday, allowing the weekly fatigue to be confused with rattling. Nobody looked at the clock or the phone stressed in case they were late. And the train has done its job well.
“For now, it’s working,” says Anna, a mother who lives in Barcelona, works in Gavà, and this Saturday, after three weeks of traveling by car because she didn’t trust Rodalies, she got back on the train on a holiday to go to the beach with her 2-year-old son. An uneventful journey that has made this woman consider parking the car again. Although this morning’s normalcy is a victory marred by the chaos of the night at another point on the same network and meager because it was obtained during a non-working day. A friendly match. On Monday, in official competition, Rodalies will again face more demanding competitors who will not examine it with the same Argentines as Renata, much less with those of a lover of trains like Hernán.
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