It’s suddenly fashionable to be an anorak, to be able to reel off how long it takes to get from London to Paris or Brussels by train. But we in the British media – our pages full of the continent-shrinking properties of the Eurostar service from St Pancras – aren’t alone in our obsession.
  El País had a long piece this week by that great reporter John Carlin (who was recently writing in The Daily Telegraph about Nelson Mandela) on Spain’s trains. The standfirst declared: “The plane belongs to the 20^th century, the high-speed train to the 21^st.”
   Carlin interviewed both the director-general of Renfe’s high-speed train service, AVE, and the manager of Iberia’s flights between Barcelona and Madrid. Each argued the superiority of his own service, but the airline man, stressing that he was giving his own view rather than that of his company, made a telling admission: “The AVE will do us a lot of damage… before long air traffic inside the country will be [only] for connections to long-haul flights.”
   Ticking off the advantages in general of train over plane, Carlin says that the smooth running of the former isn’t subject to the vagaries of the weather. Presumably it’s a while since he’s ridden a commuter train in London, and he’s forgotten those announcements about the adjustments in timetabling necessitated by “autumn leaf fall”.