Page 80 - Vía Libre Special - 25 Years of Spanish High Speed Rail

SPECIAL
years of Spanish high speed rail railway album
Work on a cafeteria car of an
AVE Series 100 (March 1993).
AVE operative looking at some telecommunication
system control screens (July 1999).
Train staff awaiting passengers on a platform
of the Puerta de Atocha station in Madrid before
they board (October 1994).
80 Vía Libre • Special 25th Anniversary of the AVE Edition
Inside an AVE
laboratory car.
mistakes; for the first time in our professional
lives mistakes were not punished but rewarded.
Transparency and learning from mistakes, which
we shared so as not to repeat them, made us
stronger and better. We lost the fear of getting
things wrong, of innovation, of the customer;
we no longer shied away from customers but
rather sought them out. We wanted to address
their problems, hear their criticisms; we began
to understand that learning from our mistakes
made us better, greater and prouder.
We learned how to get to know our cus-
tomers (there were some who disliked the fact
that we had stopped calling them passengers,
which they were, but they were also customers)
and that changed our way of seeing, performing
and understanding our role. And we understood
what was or might come to be the satisfaction
of our customers, their appreciation, and their
contribution to a new way of being and acting.
So began continuous training, first spon-
taneously and then in a more regulated manner,
which has been so important to us and which
has helped us overcome so many difficulties, by
bringing us up to speed and equipping us to ad-
dress new challenges and opportunities. The ear-
ly adoption of new train and associated techno-
logies (we already had mobile phones, albeit using
TMA technology; GSM would arrive later) also
helped improve internal and external processes.
Our commitment to providing excellent
customer service customer led us to seek trai-
ning in subjects that were not traditional railway
skills; we wanted to learn computing, languages,
protocol, behavioural studies, etc. In short we
wanted to grow and improve.
And so the dream began to take shape,
with small victories in the day-to-day. It was nei-