Train travel overtakes the plane in Spain

[CHamilton]

Train travel overtakes the plane in Spain

MADRID (AP) — The train in Spain is more popular than the plane. ...
[M]ore people travelled domestically by high-speed train than by plane in January for the first time since monthly records began.
It said 1.9 million people went by train between Spanish cities in January, up 22 percent on the same month 2013. By comparison, 1.8 million people took internal flights, down 7.3 percent from 2013.
Travel by train has grown in popularity in recent years. One reason is that extending of Ave bullet-train connections between Madrid and other Spanish cities, greatly reducing travel time.
While prices between both forms of transport are comparable, the state rail company Renfe has reduced ticket prices and introduced a greater range of discount offers over the last year.

 

[Swadian Hardcore]

Not surprising, since Amtrak already surpassed airline travel in the NEC. Rail routes in Spain are pretty much NECx20.

 

[cirdan]

The airlines have pretty much retreated from routes that are in direct competition to AVE. Madrid Alicante flights used to be every 2 hours or less, and now they're down to something like three flights a day (and even those use much smaller planes than they used to). The AVE has also done some wonderful work integrating with local transit. If you arrive in Alicante and need to continue your journey by light rail, you just type the code of your train ticket into a machine and it gives you a free light rail ticket. Similar arrangements are in place in other cities. But in Alicante they went one step further. When they realised that one of the late AVEs arrived at a time that the light rail system had stopped running, they added a round of extra late services connecting with the AVE. These are things the airlines never thought about.