Rodalies is such a chaos of delays and cancellations that one student has had enough. And he is already demanding 9,200 euros from Renfe

What price do you put on your time?

Airline and railway companies are clear: time is worth the same as the train ticket. With more or less flexibility When it comes to refunding a ticket, these companies are very clear and the law protects them.

But what price do you put on your time when that delay directly affects your work or your daily life? David Pujol, a second-year Mathematics student at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), is also very clear about it. In your case, 9,211.35 euros.

And he is already claiming that money from Renfe.

Psychological damage and a change of residence

Psychological problems that have aggravated his obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), academic damage and a forced change of residence.

This is what, according to the Catalan student David Pujol, has caused the malfunction of Rodalies, the Cercanías service of Catalonia. It includes everything in the document that has been presented against the Ministry of Transport and the Department of Territory as a claim to recover the 9,200 euros in which it values ​​​​the 55 serious incidents that have been documented between September 2024 and May 2026, they explain in The Country.

These serious incidents refer to train cancellations without prior notice and the absence of real-time information to be able to take an alternative route. “I have lost entire days of my life”the young man pointed out this same week in Cope where it affected the problems generated by delays.

Among their complaints is the inability to organize their day correctly given the countless problems at Rodalies. Recognize elDiario.es that his house in Pineda de Mar is far from the faculty by public transport but that the journey, which was supposed to take two hours, was rarely less than two and a half hours and, on occasions, could last up to four hours.

“I got up at four in the morning to get to class and, many times, I didn’t even get there,” the digital media stressed. The only solution he found was to move to Cerdanyola del Vallès where he paid for the apartment with one of the scholarships awarded for education.

These continued delays and cancellations, he explains, have had direct effects on his studies and mental health. That is why he claims 9,211.35 euros which breaks down as follows:

• 211.35 euros for the reimbursement of transport passes
• 4,500 euros for the worsening of his obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)
• 2,500 euros for violation of the right to education
• 2,000 euros for the forced move

Although this time he has taken the step of claiming these more than 9,000 euros as full compensation for all the damage caused, Pujol has been filing complaints with the Rodalies service for some time, with 33 complaints in physical format and nine in digital format, another three complaints to the Síndic de Greuges (Catalan Ombudsman) and another to the Labor Inspection for non-compliance with minimum services during a day of strike.

But also, he has been making his work public for some time. In the image above you can see that in the first three months of 2025 alone it had already filed 15 formal complaints about cancellations or delays. With each one of them, the young student accompanied the information with a post in X. The result: in the summer he got a meeting with two senior officials from the Government and Renfe.

In The Newspaper already noted that most of these problems that Pujol referred to had their origin in the use of lines R7 and R1two of the lines with the most problems in the entire Catalan network. In fact, just two days after the top post on X, Rodalies registered severe problems on lines R4, R3, R7, R8 and R15.

It is just one of the cases that exemplify the poor functioning of the Catalan network. This same week, The Vanguard collected a multitude of testimonies from train users in Catalonia in which some claimed to leave home up to an hour early “just in case” to arrive at their workplace on time. Among the voices in the report there was a general solution: switch to the bus. This means of transport is also saturated but, several users say, it is more reliable than trains.

“I had been waiting at the station for two hours and I had seen how the first three trains of the morning had been cancelled, without anyone giving us any explanations,” Pujol told elDiario.es a few days ago. He was then talking about a specific day in March 2025.

Today, in May 2026, there are WhatsApp groups with more than a thousand users who send alert messages when a Rodalies train fails again, as they assure The Vanguardthe information from the company is null.

Photo | eldelinux and David Pujol

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