CHAPTER V
Travelling in Spain: four grades of trains but only one price—Ten miles an hour—Dangerous speed—Amusing the villagers—A slow night journey—Suppressing a raconteur—“Shall we go?”—Hot water while we wait—The paralytic—Taking a photograph—The beauty at the window—A discourteous custom—Empty minds—The toothpick—A gentleman of the old school—Hospitality at Antequera—A Spanish dinner table—Delightful memories.
Travelling in this country is really a trial to the patience. It is true that the main lines have now been made comfortable, with corridor carriages, well-cushioned seats, and good lighting on the night trains; but the unpunctuality and the purposeless delays all along the line make even a short journey tiresome and a long one intolerable, unless one resolutely determines only to look at the comic side of things.
There are four classes of passenger trains, and we may take the journey from Madrid to Seville as typical of the rest. This line is used by the King, the Court, and the governing classes generally, and is travelled by nearly every tourist who comes to Spain, for every one wants to see Seville, Cordova, and Granada, while naturally the capital, with its superlative picture gallery, is the objective of all foreigners interested in art.
AN ANCIENT GATEWAY.
The slowest of these trains is the mixto, a sort of cross between a passenger and a luggage train. The distance from Madrid to Seville is 358 miles, and the mixto does the journey in twenty-four hours and twenty minutes, or at the rate of nearly fifteen miles an hour, if it gets in punctually, which it seldom or never does. Next we have the correo or mail train, which nominally takes eighteen hours one way and nineteen the other—the more rapid journey being rather under twenty miles an hour. Then comes the expreso, which takes eleven and a half hours one way and twelve the other, travelling at the rate of about thirty miles an hour; and then the expreso de lujo, which does the journey in eleven hours and forty minutes, being a shade faster than the expreso. Both these last are trains de luxe, with dining-car and the wagon-lits Company’s carriages, and are usually pretty punctual. These trains, be it remembered, are running on one of the chief main lines of Spain.