My Spanish Year

by Ellen M. Whishaw

On the branch lines nothing like these speeds are attained. On one of these, as I was told by a friend who often had to travel by it, the usual rate was ten miles an hour, and the district petitioned the railway to reduce the speed, which was considered highly dangerous. The petition was refused, on the ground that if the train went any slower it would come too expensive, on account of the increased coal consumption.

With true Spanish inconsistency the same fares are charged for all these trains except the trains de luxe, for which an excess of ten per cent. is levied on the first-class fares. On these trains there is no second-class, and on one of them only a single third-class carriage. The mixto is horribly uncomfortable, and the carriages of all classes are usually dirty, but one need not fear any rudeness or roughness from one’s fellow-travellers.

It was once my fate to travel by a mixto from a wayside station where I had missed the express after a long donkey ride across country. My men had never been there, but when it became evident that by no possibility could I catch the train I had intended, they declared, in their desire to reassure me, that there was a decent posada close to the station where I could comfortably spend the night. We arrived to find not even a cottage, but only a choza or hovel, built of stones and thatched with reeds, and a canteen consisting of the bar and a tiny room off it, where the railway people took their meals, for it was a junction of some importance, and several men were employed there. I had no alternative but to go on by the mixto, and I sat for seven mortal hours in that train, travelling in all eighty-four miles. It was about three in the morning when I reached a town which gave reasonable promise of possessing some sort of hotel, and at least half of that time we spent at stations, all lighted up and all crowded with villagers, just as if it were day.

I am bound to say that although the seats were so hard and so grimy, and the jolting of the train so incessant that sleep was impossible, I neither heard nor saw anything offensive, although my fellow-travellers were all men, and there was not one gentleman, in the conventional sense of the term, among the lot. One man, it is true, began a funny story which it was probably just as well that I did not understand, but before he came to the point his friends hushed him up, on the ground that they had heard it all before, whereupon the facetious person so promptly dropped asleep that I guessed he had been looking too long on the wine-cup before he started. Nothing was said to me, but I quite understood that the raconteur was silenced out of consideration for my presence.

The correo on the main lines is much better than the mixto; the first and second class even have corridor carriages, and these are roomy and comfortably cushioned. If time were absolutely no object—as indeed seems to be the case in Spain—one need not complain of the correo at all. But to people who prefer getting to their journey’s end to sitting in the train, the endless delays and the purposeless dawdling are intensely irritating. The train stops at every little station, apparently to amuse the villagers, for often no one gets either in or out, though there will be from twenty to a hundred loafers on the platform. After long waiting a guard is heard to inquire, “Shall we go?” (Vamonos?); some other official says, “Let’s go!” (Vamonos!); a third rings a bell and shouts, “My lords the travellers to the train!” (Señores viajeros, al tren!); some one blows a horn, the engine whistles two or three times, and we drift out as vaguely as we drifted in, ten, twenty, or thirty minutes before.

At one station on a very dull journey which I often have occasion to make, an extra delay seems to have been arranged to enable the wives of the stationmaster, the canteen keeper, and the one porter to obtain a supply of hot water from the engine boiler, for every time I travel that way I see a group of these ladies filling cans and buckets from a steaming jet which certainly is not let off anywhere else.

At another station we spend an interminable time watering the engine. This station is only half an hour from a junction where the train waits, according to schedule, for thirty minutes, and why the water cannot be taken in then, the demon of dilatoriness that presides over Spanish railways alone knows. This, like the distribution of hot water, does not occur only once in a way. I have been over the line eight times, for my sins, and have seen the same incidents every time.

Once our train waited an extra ten minutes while a poor paralysed old woman was conveyed in front of the engine from a train alongside of ours to the exit from the station, where a donkey awaited her. The porter carried her slung over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, head downwards. We all thought she was dead until we saw her hands waving and heard her shrill voice bidding the man shift her into an easier position, which he did, by no means unkindly. She was a very poor woman, and her old husband trudged after her, bearing a couple of worn pillows and a bag of food. It was clear that there was no money wherewith to tip that porter. No one grumbled at the time lost by our train, which was already close on an hour late, although she might just as well have been carried behind it and thus let us go on. They only said, “Poor creature! She seems very ill.” On the other hand, no one thought of producing pesetas or even coppers to alleviate her sufferings, though probably if I had been ready-witted enough to suggest it, most of my travelling companions would have contributed. Spaniards are curiously destitute of imagination in such cases, but when I have had the presence of mind to propose some such obvious charity as the above they have quickly followed suit, expressing admiration of our English initiative.

The funniest example of official indifference to the time table that I have seen occurred on a journey from Algeciras to Bobadilla. During a long pause at a wayside station one of our party got out to photograph a group of picturesque beggars—for on the Andalucian railways beggars are chartered libertines, permitted to climb up to the windows and pester the travellers for money. Before he had finished the bell rang for the train to start, but seeing how he was engaged the stationmaster politely turned to the guard.