Nostalgia and bitterness accompany Mari Carmen Berrocal when she walks through the old Bobadilla Station, a population center created in 1865 for the inauguration of the Córdoba-Málaga railway and which today is a symbol of decadence and abandonment. of the train in depopulated Spain.
“20 years ago, when I came on the Talgo from Barcelona, Bobadilla was a town with a lot of life and a strategic node in the railway network, but now it keeps losing population, it makes me want to cry,” says this 73-year-old woman. years, wife and daughter-in-law of railroad workers.
The Bobadilla Station, a Local Autonomous Entity (ELA) close to the Malaga municipality of Antequera, has been the starting point of the protest marches that the Platform in Defense of the Rural Train in Andalusia (PTRA) has organized and that they will travel many of the stations that have been abandoned or relegated to testimonial services within the Andalusian community.
The first stage last Saturday joined Bobadilla with the Sevillian town of Casariche and in the coming days the marches will continue through the provinces of Córdoba and Jaén.
The members of this platform travel by car to the places to which the train has turned its back, but when they reach each town they march on foot to collect the support and solidarity of the neighbors.
"We have chosen the conventional Bobadilla-Córdoba line as a starting point due to its abandonment and because, despite being perfectly equipped, electrified and with increased platforms, in the last 10 years it has not seen any train pass that provides public transport service to populations. such as Fuente de Piedra, La Roda de Andalucía, Puente Genil, Aguilar de la Frontera, Montilla, Montemayor or Fernán Núñez,” laments Mari Carmen Berrocal.
Miguel Montenegro, head of the CGT railway sector in Andalusia, speaks of a “railway emergency” situation in the community, where, in his opinion, all the provinces “are affected by the dismantling of conventional lines due to the bet that has made towards High Speed.”
For this union member, this means of public transport must be a priority to fight against depopulation.
In this sense, from the rural train platform they denounce the direct “discrimination” suffered by the regions of the Andalusian interior by having mobility prohibited by collective rail transport while commuter and medium-distance users benefit from the free service.
“In the absence of trains, we have to travel in vehicles that emit large amounts of CO₂ into the atmosphere and, therefore, do not contribute to stopping climate change,” says Montenegro.
The platform formed by different Andalusian groups demands an Andalusian pact for the railway that involves prioritizing the use of the railway infrastructures that already exist without the need to undertake million-dollar investments or pharaonic works.
“To achieve this, it is essential that administrations declare a good number of lines that have been forgotten and that would be easy to reactivate as a public service obligation,” says the CGT member.
1992, the turning point
Although the railway depression extends throughout Andalusia, the province of Jaén is the one that presents the most desolate panorama.
Since 1992, 90% of services have been lost, mainly because the Madrid-Seville AVE (the first to come into operation) was designed through Brazatortas, in Ciudad Real, avoiding Jaén.
This situation could have been corrected with the design of the AVE route to Granada, three years ago, but the people of Jaén denounced that the province was once again subjected to “the cobra”.
Luis Marín, a railway worker for 49 years at different stations in the country until his retirement in Linares-Baeza, another emblem of railway decline, is clear about the cause that has led to this situation: “The problem is that since 1992 the railway has been abandoned. maintenance of conventional routes because they wanted to put all their eggs in the same basket, that of the AVE;
"We do not need High Speed in each Spanish province and we do need to invest in the infrastructure that was abandoned."
And, among them, he cites some that disappeared decades ago, such as the old oil train between Linares-Baeza and Puente Genil, or the Baeza-Utiel, a key line for connections between Andalusia and the Levant that never came into service. service despite having most of the tracks and stations already built.
Precisely, the old Baeza-Begíjar station is on the Hispania Nostra Red List due to the unfortunate architectural deterioration of its facilities, abandoned in the last third of the last century.
Meanwhile, cultural groups from these regions have been waiting for two decades for the launch of the Renaissance Greenway, which should travel along the roads that never came into operation.
Another citizen platform, Jaén Merece Más, took part in a new rally in recent days in front of the doors of the Jaén station to denounce the “grievance” that this province suffers in railway matters.
“Renfe has made it a rule to get us, the people of Jaén, accustomed to taking us hours late or transferring buses as if we were third-class citizens,” said the spokesperson, Juan Afán.
The president of the Jaén Provincial Council, the socialist Francisco Reyes, recently recognized the shortcomings that the province has with the railway: "It cannot be that it takes four hours to reach the capital of Spain from Jaén."
To shorten travel time, work is being done on connecting the province of Jaén with the High Speed connection through Montoro (Córdoba).
And it has also come as a shock that the European Union has rejected, in the revised Regulation of the Trans-European Transport Network, financing the construction of a railway line linking Jaén with Granada and Motril.
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