MADRID – It’s 8 a.m. at the Puerto de Atocha train station in central Madrid. Business travelers armed with cellphones and laptops, and pleasure travelers toting cameras and carry-on bags, make their way through security to board the high-speed trains that connect Spain’s capital to cities across the nation.

The sprawling station, which dates to the 1890s, serves not only the AVE, or Alta Velocidad Española high-speed trains, but also the city’s metro subway and commuter trains. It sits amid a bustling district of offices, hotels, restaurants, museums and other businesses.

This is the vision shared by backers of California’s proposed, but controversial, high-speed rail system. And there are lessons – from both successes and mistakes – that California can learn from Spain’s 20-year history with high-speed trains.

Top among them is just how hard it is to be self-sufficient, even when conditions seem ideal, as they have in Spain.

Despite popular and political support from the very beginning, the AVE rail system faces a tougher future in the midst of Europe’s financial crisis.

Already, service between some smaller cities has been cut because too few people ride the trains. Some wonder if it is anything more than a luxury commuter service.

Among the growing fraternity of nations with high-speed trains, Spain is considered the best geographic and cultural analogy to California and its train plans. The long-distance AVE trains and their regional cousins Avant and Alvia, which share the high-speed tracks, connect major urban centers but pass through smaller cities and stretches of rural farmland, just like what is planned for California.

They’ve gotten people out of their cars and off airplanes, sliced travel times, and attracted millions of riders a year – just what California rail boosters hope will happen here.

Since the late 1980s, Spain has spent about $60 billion to build and equip its high-speed network.

President Barack Obama touted Spain’s system as a model for American high-speed rail plans when he announced billions of dollars in federal investments in April 2009.

Spain’s system, however, was launched in conditions much different from what California is experiencing today. Political unity, a thriving economy and the spotlight of international events – a world exposition in Seville and the Olympic Games in Barcelona – all provided an impetus for Spain to embark on its high-speed journey.

About the only major point of contention was where the first line from Madrid should go (Seville won over Barcelona), not whether it should happen at all.

While Spain continues to build and expand its system through both good and bad economic times, cost is a key concern in cash-strapped California. Planners are wrestling with a price tag that has doubled over the past two years and grappling with the thorny issue of where to get the money to build it when both state and federal budgets are under strain.

Unlike in California, Spain’s high-speed rail effort has not been a public or political punching bag. It’s rapidly expanded to become Europe’s most extensive high-speed network – and third only to China and Japan’s worldwide – while facing remarkably little of the NIMBYism, farm opposition or politics fermenting throughout California.

The people who ride the AVE trains love them. Merchants who do business near the stations in rail-connected cities such as Barcelona, Seville and Cordova say they generally believe the trains are good for their cities, good for business and good for the country. The project has been supported by both conservative- and Socialist-led governments.

But with Spain and the rest of Europe mired in a lingering economic crisis, those attitudes may slowly be changing.

Economists and engineers acknowledge that the system is well engineered, well built and state of the art and that the service is top notch, comfortable, safe and punctual.

Despite assurances from the Spanish government that the long-distance AVE trains operate without a public subsidy, academics and analysts don’t believe that even the busiest high-speed route – between Madrid and Barcelona – musters enough riders to cover its operating costs, much less the billions of euros invested to build the infrastructure over the past 20 years.

Speed and comfort

On an overcast November morning, rain clouds hang low in the sky over the olive orchards of Castile-La Mancha, the territory of central Spain. As the 10 a.m. AVE train from Madrid to Seville races gracefully on its steel tracks, trees and structures flash past the window – the only tangible indication to passengers that they are moving at more than 180 mph.

In a car, the roughly 300-mile drive to Seville, in the southwestern region of Andalusia, would take about five to six hours. This eight-car, French-built Alstom Class 100 train can hold up to 332 passengers and cross the distance in less than 2½ hours.

Inside the passenger cars, the ride is smooth and quiet. The seats have plenty of legroom, and a power outlet for electronics. Attendants give earbuds to passengers so they can listen to music or watch movies. About the only convenience lacking is Wi-Fi Internet access.

Fewer than half of the seats on this train – one of 21 daily high-speed AVE or Alvia trains to Seville – are occupied, so there is plenty of room to spread out, even in tourist class.

Tourist-class tickets on the Madrid-Seville train run between $56 and $112, depending on the departure time.

There are certainly cheaper ways to get around the country. A bus ticket from Madrid to Seville costs about $27, but takes between 6½ and eight hours. Airline flights are faster to cover the distance and can be about the same price or less.

“But you have to get to the airport one or two hours early, find a place to park, go through security and then wait at the airport at the other end,” said Esther San Felipe, a pharmaceutical representative who rides the train from Madrid to Seville about once a month. “For just a little bit more money, you can have something much better.”

San Felipe is hardly alone in her enthusiasm for the high-speed trains.

The Madrid-to-Seville line became Spain’s first high-speed train route when it opened in early 1992, coinciding with Seville hosting Expo 1992.

Renfe, the Spanish government-owned company that operates all passenger trains in the country – including the AVE, Avant and Alvia high-speed trains – under the umbrella of the Ministry of Public Works and Transport, reports that by the end of 1993, the first full year of high-speed service, AVE trains accounted for more than half of all passenger travel between Madrid and Seville. Automobile traffic, in the meantime, fell from 60 percent of the volume to about 34 percent.

For more than a decade, Madrid-Seville was Spain’s only operating high-speed line, and ridership grew modestly, reaching about 4.8 million by 2002. New lines to Lleida, Zaragoza and Huesca opened in 2003 and to Tarragona, Valladolid and Malaga in 2006 and 2007, but didn’t drive much growth.

It wasn’t until high-speed tracks opened to Barcelona, Spain’s second-largest city, four years ago that ridership experienced a real growth spurt.

Total high-speed ridership on the long-distance and regional trains peaked at nearly 17 million in 2009.

Ridership has since tapered off as Spain, like the rest of Europe and much of the world, copes with economic troubles.

Spain now has nearly 1,740 miles of high-speed tracks, lines that serve as spokes with Madrid as the hub. By 2015, the nation plans to nearly double the miles of track.

Over the next decade, the Spanish government plans to spend up to $77 billion more to expand and improve its high-speed lines, said Juan Ignacio Campo Jori, director of international projects for ADIF, another government-owned company that manages and operates Spain’s railway infrastructure.

But with no sign of Europe’s financial crisis letting up, some say the government needs to slow its spending.

In the early years of developing high-speed trains, Spain was “in kind of a booming situation,” said Andreu Ulied, director of a noted engineering and consulting firm in Barcelona. “Now the situation is completely different.”

In recent years, the European Union funneled about $17 billion in grants and billions more in low-interest loans to Spain to improve its high-speed rail.

But Ulied said that will end in a couple of years, leaving Spain to bear the entire cost of its ambitious expansion plans.

Ulied and Germa Bel, a professor of political economics at the University of Barcelona, agree that none of the Spanish high-speed rail routes has enough riders to make the system financially sustainable.

“There is no question whether (Spain’s system) can cover its costs. It cannot,” Bel said. “It actually has not recovered one single euro from the infrastructure investment. The government claims they are recovering the operating costs, but the numbers are not clear.”

The busiest high-speed lines in the world are capable of making money, Bel said, including between Paris and Lyon, where about 25 million people ride the French TGV trains each year, and the Japanese Shinkansen trains between Tokyo and Osaka, which draw about 130 million riders a year.

“But this is not the case with any single line in Spain,” Bel said.

Ulied said Spain’s efforts have been based not on serious economic analysis, but on political desires to connect the rest of the nation to Madrid. “We had the money, we had the ability to do so, so we did it,” he said. “The engineering was very good. The quality of the service is excellent. And everything is nice, very nice. The problem is that it is luxurious. Maybe it is too good for us.”

“The question is maybe the whole thing was partially a mistake,” Ulied said of lines to smaller cities with fewer riders. “We didn’t need all these lines, actually.”

The Spanish lesson

Spain is among the high-speed nations that hope to participate in construction of California’s proposed 520-mile line between San Francisco and Los Angeles.

California officials, armed with about $3 billion in federal stimulus and transportation funds from the Obama administration and $3 billion in money from Proposition 1A – a 2008 bond measure – want to start construction this year on a 120-mile stretch from north of Fresno to Bakersfield.

Future sections would extend toward San Francisco or Los Angeles if more money becomes available. But no high-speed trains would operate on the line until it extends to the Bay Area or the Los Angeles basin.

Backers in California tout the potential environmental benefits – reduced air pollution and less freeway congestion – of getting people out of gasoline- and diesel-fueled automobiles and onto electric-powered trains.

Even the enthusiastic Spanish officials, however, are curious about the logic of starting in the sparsely populated middle of California. The environmental benefits won’t be realized, they said, if the cities along the first line don’t have enough people to generate ridership.

“You need to have either Los Angeles or San Francisco,” said Pedro Pérez del Campo, environmental policy director for ADIF. “They should build it where it will have an impact so that people will support it.”

Building the system in the first place has significant disruptive effects before any benefits can be realized, Pérez del Campo said.

“It can be a failure or a fiasco if it starts in two cities that aren’t as well populated or if there isn’t as much attraction,” he said. “The lesson is to do it right the first time, or extending it will not be possible because the public won’t be in agreement.

“The people here have been in agreement.”