2026 will go down in the history of Renfe and Adif's service in Catalonia as the year in which both state-owned companies, with the invaluable help of the train drivers, broke a new record: the service went from very poor to nonexistent.
The government has left 400,000 people without trains for days, and even today, commuters go to stations hoping for a lucky break and to board some kind of train to take them to work in the morning and back home at night. However, we are in luck: the ministry has found another 1.7 billion euros in a drawer, which it will allocate to Catalonia over the next five years. Whether it will actually be spent, as ARA readers know, is another story. With the millions promised for rail infrastructure by Zapatero and Rajoy, the Cercanías commuter rail system would be the envy of the developed world today.
It took the apotheosis of chaos for the State to say it will allocate more money (ours). It's a huge undertaking, and yet people have shown commendable patience and resignation. The demobilization is palpable, because the response to the chaos of these days should be on the scale of a general strike or a bank closure, which no major union is even considering, of course. And those who want to get on the train at seven in the morning surely belong to what we should still call the working class. The last thing we need is for the organizers of two protests on the same day to be unable to agree.
The lack of trust these days isn't just people's trust in Renfe and Adif (which is more than justified), but also in political parties, unions, and ourselves as a society. That's the trust we must regain.
