“50 minutes late, the mother who gave birth to him.” Barely set foot in front of the Cáceres station and Jacinta Juárez is already furious. This 66-year-old woman from Cáceres arrives every month by train from Madrid, where she has lived for 49 years, to her hometown. If you ask her, she is not a satisfied user. “It’s going very badly, there are always delays. Once again we went to Madrid and another incident, an hour and a quarter, an hour and twenty. Another day, the car was on fire. They had us there. Come on, in the last four years it has gotten worse, enough to write a book,” laments Juárez.
In recent years, Extremadura has experienced a sustained cycle of social mobilizations in defense of the railway decent, promoted by citizen platforms, social groups and town halls which denounce the deterioration of service, continuous delays, breakdowns and lack of structural investment.
The protests, with periodic rallies at train stations, symbolic reductions and massive demonstrations in cities like Cáceres, Badajoz or Mérida, have made the train one of the main symbols of perceived territorial claims in the region. Far from being diluted over time, these demands have remained active and cross-cutting, linking the poor rail connection to broader problems such as depopulation, lack of economic opportunities and youth emigration.
THE insufficient rail connections were identified as Extremadura’s main problem by almost 20% of Extremadura residents in a survey carried out by DYM for 20 minutes on December 15, only behind the lack of opportunities for young people.
“The model that has been used decades after decades of investment in road transport, in principle, many years ago. These are the governments that have existed, which are generally the PP and the PSOE”, explains Solange Jarquín, co-spokesperson of the Extremeña Platform for a train that structures the territory and cools the planet. “We demand a rail network that connects the regions, the regional capitals to the main cities. And that it is connected like a commuter train, as there is currently in Madrid, but in Extremadura.”
Delays and frustration
At the gates of Cáceres station, complaints about the service are numerous, both among arriving travelers and those about to take a train. The majority regrets the unavailability and continued delayssome have even experienced it within the trains themselves, which regularly undergo stoppages along the way due to the frustration of passengers.
“A week ago there was a 40 minute delay, because we stopped somewhere in the middle, between Madrid and I don’t know where. And I think there is only one way and we have to let the three who arrive pass,” remembers Gonzalo Ballel, who is preparing to take the train to Madrid, where he will fly to get married this weekend in Chile. “They send you a message, but hey, you’re on the train, you can’t do anything either. Read something and take it philosophically.”
Aurora Leiva, 66, describes the service as “horror”. This woman from Cáceres takes the train almost every month to go to Madrid to see her family and, although she admits that the situation “has improved lately”, she remembers how they were “stopped at the train’s departure, held for almost an hour and they didn’t give you any information. We are therefore abandoned in transport. Absolutely abandoned.”
Of course, not everything is critical, some travelers do not see the situation so dramatically, although there is always room for improvement. Taras, a Ukrainian citizen who has lived in Extremadura for two years, is a regular user of the train to Madrid and believes that “the system is very correct”, although regrets the price rise. However, he believes that “the problem is not in the price of the ticket, there is a lack of seats and I cannot return. There were seven or ten trains this Friday and there are no free seats to return.”
Another woman who does not give her name is even more understanding. “I haven’t had any incidents, except once when I was half an hour late, nothing, always very good,” he says before entering the station. “I think people are also a little critical. There’s everything, right? And if they had bad luck… I didn’t have any.”
A citizen fight
Navalmoral de la Mata is the first stop the train makes from Madrid when entering Extremadura. Citizens of this town of 17,000 inhabitants, located just 20 km from the Almaraz nuclear power plant, participated one of the region’s fiercest railway battles.
The population is currently practically divided in two due to the work carried out precisely on the railway lines. The old station is completely scaffolded and a footbridge has been installed which connects pedestrians to the improvised cement platform built until the work is completed. There, at an ant’s pace, the train from Madrid to Mérida arrives.
“The service is poor, we had a lot of surprises,” said Beatriz Fadón, 55, one of the passengers who just got off the train. She lives in the Comarca de la Vera, north of Navalmoral, and now has to make the journey home. “With the mobility limitations and the mobility difficulties that we have on this vast territory and with such dispersed municipalities, it seems to me that there is a good way, that is to say an alternative to the private vehicle, which is essential.”
It is precisely this requirement for a railway network that connects not so much the big cities to Madrid but the small towns of Extremadura, which is one of the main demands of organizations such as Navalmoral Contra el Muro. The inhabitants of the municipality included in the association They came to cut the railway lines by demanding that the route of the AVE was buried and would not divide the city into two flanked by two walls, as will eventually happen.
“It seems incredible that the politicians and administrations that manage transport and railways do not know in which region we live. We live in a region of a million inhabitants. But we do not want to live in a single city, as they do in Aragon in Zaragoza, but rather in 388 villages”, says José María González, coordinator of the Navalmoral platform against the wall. “In the famous 2010, it was announced that the AVE was going to arrive and what we are asking is that there really be a transport policy in the region. That all these cities can have access to the services provided by the railway and we demand it because otherwise this region will go to hell. It is depopulating. A young person who does not have a car cannot live in the region.”
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