El Tren Maya

A tale of two railways. In 2019, after a decade of planning, consulting, designing, budgeting, legal challenges and other various controversies, work finally began on HS2. A shiny new high speed railway from London to Birmingham with forks off to Manchester and Leeds. And then work stopped, and started again and thenstopped again. The lines north of Birmingham got knocked on the head, although the Labour Party (in opposition) promised to reinstate it. Then (when in power) changed their mind. But they did at least decide that the line will definitely go all the way into London Euston. Probably.

Building stuff in the UK is a nightmare. Try and build it anywhere posh and Mrs Gladys Beddlington-Smythe of Nimby Avenue will rouse up the neighbourhood in furious opposition, with letters sent in to object to everything and anything at the planning stage. The local council will review the objections and after a few million quid has been splurged in legal fees over a period of months or years, the chairman of the council, Mr Henry Beddlington-Smythe, will (to no one’s surprise) uphold the objections. Cue millions of pounds and months more time to be wasted as the process is sent up the ladder for further reviews.

Want to build something on some land where there is a tree? Greenpeace will quickly involve themselves and even once all the legalities have been resolved, further delays will ensue when ‘Swampy’ Jones climbs up the tree and chains himself to a branch. And he will not come down for months. Or until his pot supply runs out, whichever is sooner. And every now and again, when someone foolishly tries to turn some slums into something nice, they will be met by protesters with filthy finger nails and soiled trousers holding up signs with poor spelling and atrocious grammar, insisting on their right to continue living in rat infested dwellings with raw sewage sloshing around on the kitchen floor. If you are a builder in the UK, of any sort, you can’t win. If you’re trying to build a new railway….well. Good luck.

In Mexico in 2019, someone had a cracking idea about a ginormous shiny railway system chuffing around the Yucatán peninsula and quickly put the plans to a public referendum. The people said ‘Si!’, the builders went in, a cloud of concrete dust went up and then just five years and £20 billion later – wallop! A fabulous new 1000 mile railway network, complete with stations and onward transport links, was open for business. That’s how it’s done in Mexico. Yes, yes there have been a few problems and controversies. A fair amount of jungle got ripped up, cenotes were polluted, some people were displaced to live in some different trees and enough environmentally-unfriendly concrete was used to replace the entire housing stock of a small country. Parts of the construction are already falling to pieces, there are leaks all over the gaff and the whereabouts of Lagunito Lopez (Swampy Jones Mexican cousin) remains a mystery.

Still. Mrs P and I recently found ourselves in Cancun Airport, needing to get ourselves across to Merida. A journey we’ve done more than once before. Usually it’s a bus trip, but this time we took the train. Of course we did, or this little essay wouldn’t exist. I treated us to First Class tickets, bought online a week or two in advance. Not cheap – they cost about £100 for the two singles. Although my International Tourist rate ticket was more expensive than Mrs P’s Yucatan Resident ticket.

From the airport we paid a few pesos and jumped on the Tren Maya shuttle bus to the train station. We loitered, until the station security team decided the time was right to start scanning tickets and bags. And then we revelled in the confusion as two trains arrived minutes apart, with no one – staff included – entirely sure which one was going where. Someone did eventually work out what was what, and we were all rather bizarrely lead on the longest possible route down to the correct platform and on to the train, where we all quickly found ourselves our specified seats. When I say ‘we all’, I mean Mrs P, myself and the other three people boarding the train.

The ride itself was very comfortable. Very smooth. Very quiet. Not least because we were the only people in the carriage. We liked the bar. There was plenty of space for our luggage. The scenery? Well it was dark. But had it not been, I imagine it would have been very green, but perhaps monotonously so. A chap came through every hour sweeping and tidying, even though there was a distinct lack of anything needing to be swept or tidied. Pointless, but I admired his dedication. The whole journey ran on time. And whilst my stamp of approval is fairly meaningless, el Tren Maya has it. But it probably does need to rather substantially increase the ridership from its current average of less than 2,000 a day. Because those numbers don’t make for a viable train service. That’s a private chauffeur service on rails.

Meanwhile, back in Blighty, nearly £40 billion has so far been spent on HS2. From what I can make out, that’s paid for a couple of small holes to be dug in Birmingham, a lot of scaffolding and barriers and stirred a whole bunch of people into varying states of apoplectic rage.