For years I have been telling people I want to take the night train from Madrid to Lisbon, and for years people have been politely not telling me it stopped running in 2020. The Sud Express is now a memory with a Wikipedia page.
So we took the day train instead — nine and a half hours, one change at Entroncamento, a sandwich that cost four euros and tasted like a sandwich. And here is the small, unfashionable thing to admit: the day train is better.
You see the border. You see the exact field where Spanish scrubland becomes Portuguese cork oak. You see a man on a tractor waving at the train because in some countries people still wave at trains. At Lisboa Oriente the light is doing that Atlantic thing where everything looks slightly overexposed.
The night train was a story I told about myself. The day train was a Tuesday.
