[tbdenney]

Having lived in both Sevilla and Barcelona, the high speed lines (until very recently only operated by RENFE as the AVE service) are really amazing and a great value. Also, RENFE has a media-distancia service that isn't quite high speed rail but still pretty fast and efficient, that serves routes like Barcelona-Valencia in ~3.5 hours.

I only wish the international high-speed routes in Europe were easier to book and the prices were lower. It's still at least 2-3x the price to take a train from Barcelona-Amsterdam for instance (which I recently did) then to fly. I have no problem with the much longer duration of the train journey but they need to do something to get trains more competitive price-wise with air, perhaps by increasing taxes significantly for short-ish (<2-3 hours?) plane trips when a viable rail alternative exists, and using that to subsidize the train tickets? I don't know what can be done but it's going to be impossible to convince the public to go on a train for longer trips when both driving and flying are way cheaper.

[Bluestein]

The whole "Eurorail" "pissing match" between jurisdictions/countries, where you have to confirm/book everything, sometimes manually, ostensibly because of "interoperability" issues ... ... is sad.-

It would be a gamechanger for Europe, were it to function in a frictionless, integrated, simple way.-