When I arrived at Barcelona Airport’s railway station to catch a train into the city centre, I had not expected buying a ticket to become the most dramatic part of the journey. There were five self-service machines, but only the second and third from the left were working. Long queues had also formed at the two staffed ticket desks, although one of those was about to close because this was evidently considered an appropriate moment to reduce capacity further.
Renfe operates the trains and its ticketing arrangements did not create an especially reassuring first impression. A Spanish passenger in the queue told me that I could not buy the required ticket through an app or aboard the train, leaving the machines and staffed desks as the only options. I had arrived three minutes before a departure, so my original train disappeared while I was still learning the rules of the challenge.
The next train was due thirty minutes later, which ought to have provided more than enough time. Unfortunately, the two surviving machines were failing intermittently and there were no members of staff nearby to help. One passenger was in tears, while another expressed his views by kicking a machine hard enough to leave a visible dent. Renfe had therefore established a customer feedback process, although perhaps not the one it had intended.
The pair immediately ahead of me finally reached a machine with eight minutes remaining before the next departure. They could not persuade it to sell them a ticket, so a local passenger stepped forward to help. He could not make it work either. Another local then told the pair in Spanish that they needed to hurry, before repeating the instruction in English when the first version produced no noticeable increase in urgency.
One of the pair announced that she would not move until a member of staff came to assist her. She was told to join the staffed queue by multiple people in the queue, but quite reasonably pointed out that she had already waited for nearly an hour and would face another lengthy delay. I watched the departure time approach with the detached serenity of someone who had precisely two minutes remaining and no control whatsoever over events. I say serenity, I was actually a little bit annoyed, but I didn’t feel the need to kick anything. I calmed myself by looking at the craft beer options in Barcelona.
The pair eventually abandoned the machine and joined the staffed queue, allowing me to have my attempt. The kiosk promptly produced an error message, but I was using ChatGPT to translate the instructions and work out which options to select. After some rapid pressing of buttons and only limited internal panic, the machine printed my ticket. Technology had therefore rescued me from a problem created almost entirely by other technology.
I was disproportionately relieved to receive this small piece of paper. I was not in a desperate hurry, but I had only a limited amount of time in central Barcelona and did not particularly want to spend another hour observing the gradual collapse of the airport ticketing system. I photographed the ticket so that ChatGPT could confirm I had bought the correct one, which it did. It had been promoted from translator to unofficial Renfe customer service department within about five minutes and I was very grateful for it.
The automatic barriers accepted my ticket and, in a particularly helpful development, the train was running three minutes late. This was one of the few occasions when a railway delay proved to be considerably useful to me.
And here comes the train. After all the complications involved in buying a ticket, the actual railway journey was in danger of seeming disappointingly straightforward, but more on that in the next post as I like to build anticipation.