All attempts at buying a ticket in advance through the otherwise helpful national rail website proved futile. I found an online travellers' forum where hundreds of people were lodging their horror stories and complaints. Some blamed the servers as being too slow, others said their banks had declined the transactions, while a few stated that the website would not accept overseas bank cards. For whatever reason, I simply could not book ourselves on a train in advance.
Giving up on the online discount, we showed up in person at Chamartin mainline station with about 20 minutes before our train. In Britain, this is not a problem, there is always a ticket machine or you can buy your tickets from the conductor on the train. Worst case scenario is maybe having to queue up for 10-15 minutes to be served at a ticket window.
Arriving mid-morning on a weekday in September (in other words, nowhere near rush hour) and the Chamartin ticketing hall had five ticketing windows mobbed by dozens of travellers. We swooped down on the handful of automated ticket machines. There were two types. The first only seemed to be for printing pre-paid tickets off the aforementioned worthless website. The others only sold tickets for the slower regional trains (we were hoping to catch the superfast AVE service).
We gave up on catching the AVE train which meant waiting an hour until the next (slow) train. We bought our tickets from the machine, which on my first try spat out all my change right when I was ready to put in my last 10 cents. For shits and giggles, we queued to buy tickets for our trip to Toledo we had planned for later in the week. I took number 823. The counter was serving ticket number 784. And I knew every single one of those 40 people ahead of us in the queue would be asking the Spanish equivalent of: 'What if I travel on a Tuesday, changed in Crewe and caught the 18.24 to Newton le Willows, is that any cheaper?'
This gave us time to buy snacks, sandwiches and water to tide us over during the 1 hour 45 minute journey from Madrid to Segovia (nearly the time it takes us to travel between Manchester and London). At least it is a scenic journey, through forests and up into the Guardarrama mountains, the first half or so we recognised from our trip to El Escorial.
The train pulled into Segovia and we soon surmised that the fast AVE trains depart from a different station, so there was no means of buying our return ticket just then. We stepped outside and caught a bus from out front which saved us a 20-minute walk into the old town.
The bus dropped us off practically underneath the magnificent Roman aqueduct.
It's amazing to think that nearly two thousand years ago the Romans could build such a structure (167 arches without mortar), all part of a network that transported water down from the mountains over 10 miles away and into their city along a steady 1% grade.
The aqueduct acts as a bridge in order to maintain the flow of water right into the fortified town, soaring over 90 feet into the air in order to span a gap nearly a half mile wide.
In my mind's eye, it ranks alongside Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids as one of the great monuments of the ancient world. Well worth all the rigamorale for getting here on the train!
The whole town of Segovia is a UNESCO World Heritage site and you'll find out more in my next post.
No comments:
Post a Comment