Talk:Rail transport in Spain

Some sources says that broad gauge was choosen to allow bigger trains. Coccodrillo 18:47, 10 November 2007 (UTC)
 * Yes, it's true... I have included it in the article, and many other things ;) David (talk) 15:32, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

gauge conversion
Spain will convert from Iberian gauge to  standard gauge around 2013. 121.102.47.39 (talk) 04:21, 5 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Do you have a source for that? I'd love to see the cost-benefit analysis for such a huge, difficult, and expensive project. bobrayner (talk) 11:06, 7 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Gauge conversion is planned but no date is given. And it will certainly not happen in 2013 (maybe around 2020-2030?). Converting lines would not be too difficult as most Spanish lines have no more than 30 trains per day... Coccodrillo (talk) 16:10, 10 June 2010 (UTC)
 * That's still about one every 40 minutes (or maybe every 30 minutes peak, 1 hour off-peak) if you assume they shut down between about midnight-30 and 4:30am... Not a great deal of time to change a whole section of track and the trains that run on it. It'd be marginal for just replacing a worn piece of rail like-for-like; really you'd want to do chunks within the 4-hour period instead. Don't think you could regauge in that time though. It'd be a "take an entire track out of action for a few days" kind of job, and then you'll have trouble of interoperability of trains on adjoining tracks using different gauges if you don't change the whole thing at once. And then you've got all the single track parts that still persist. ... Seemingly low traffic is no measure of the difficulty of the job. 146.90.234.81 (talk) 00:04, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

The french connection
Hmm - interesting. Will they have through-running from places far away in france from the border, to places far away in spain from the border? And vice versa? And will it then spread further across the international network?

Basically I'm looking forward to the time when I can walk up and buy a ticket at the office of my local commuter station in Birmingham (or indeed Newcastle) in the evening, ride into the terminus, transfer over to the HS2 terminal on a shuttle bus, then settle down into a recliner seat on a semi-sleeper service and doze off, waking up about 10 hours later on the early morning approach into Malaga or Barcelona, well rested and ready for a sunshine beach holiday after just another half hour's connecting ride on the local Renfe or similar, without even having to book into the hotel until that afternoon. Then a similarly relaxing ride back a week later, not leaving the resort until after dinner, and rocking up back home with plenty of time to unpack and get ready for work the next day.

Somehow I don't trust that something as user friendly as that is going to happen any time soon, but if they start running extra-long-distance services (with very few or no changes) between random parts of france and spain, it'd be a good start. At least the last change along the journey would then only be somewhere in france, probably about midnight outbound or 6am return... not too terrible. And still less of a hassle (and hopefully cheaper) than red-eye flights. 146.90.234.81 (talk) 00:12, 27 July 2013 (UTC)