Page 79 - Vía Libre Special - 25 Years of Spanish High Speed Rail

Interior of the cab of an AVE train (1992).

Staff loading mail sacks and packages
onto an AVE train (1997).

That Operations Department was staffed
by around sixty people in the months running
up to the inauguration and a little over one
hundred after it, including AVE train managers,
onboard services supervisors, and management
staff. Working together we managed to defend
“our project”, our way of understanding an in-
novative management model for the Spanish rai-
lway system, based on confidence, involvement
and enthusiasm. We designed a new way to
“play trains” while serving our customers, which
was our ultimate purpose.
Against a background of general mistrust,
on the day of the inauguration the dream began
to come true. Many thought we were misguided
(according to them the high speed train would
finish the day after Expo closed), others believed
we were dreamers whose dreams were doomed Working on the nose of an AVE Series 100 and its
to founder on the rocks of inertia and the old Scharfenberg coupler in a workshop at the Cerro
idea that “things are as they are and as they Negro, Madrid depot (March 1993).
have always been, and you are not going to be
able to change them”. hip began to get the most out of each and every
The truth is we hadn’t consciously planned one of us and made us leaders of our own pro- years of Spanish high speed rail
it that way, but little by little our passion for the fessional and - why not? - lifetime project.
project, our commitment, and the shared leaders- One of the success factors was our own

Vía Libre • Special 25th Anniversary of the AVE Edition 79