>>889079Spain is a fascinating country. The central government has spent around 40-50 BILLION euros on the radial HSR lines which lead from Madrid across hundreds of km of nothingness to the other populated parts of Spain (sometimes sparsely populated) traversing extremely difficult terrain, essentially making those lines useless sine they offer no benefit over air travel, because there's no significant intermediate stops and travel time isn't that competitive: usually 2.5-3.5 hours from Madrid to wherever, while flying would be about an hour + to/from airports. We now have the second largest HSR network in the world, second only to chine, while we have about half the population of Japan and two-thirds of that of France, in a very sparsely populated country, with a few dense population in rather specific areas. Yet, the suburban and regional trains in these areas are in a very sad shape, not just because train sets are old, that I could live with, but because of constant breakdowns, failures and bottlenecks make delays almost systematic on many lines.
The only stretch that could probably make sense as a HSR line or similar, as well as for freight, is the line along the mediterranean coast, sine it's almost continually populated and reaches many important ports. Yet, this stretch as I mentioned is often single-tracked or lacking rail service.
Meanwhile, regional governments do little to help this situation, since all they ask for is for the AVE to reach their region, just the other day I saw the fucktard president of Cantabria (on the atlantic coast in the north) yelling like a town drunkard that the government is leaving their region "isolated" because they don't have HSR connection, and so "freight can't get to the ports" (sic.). No mention of the dilapidated conventional line which would take a fraction to modernise, and would actually allow freight to get to the ports, which the HSR line wouldn't.
And all this while we have about 25% unemployment.
