Without electricity, Spanish trains are fixed. Three travelers share their stories

Madrid (AP) – Power outages in the paralyzed Iberian Peninsula had a particularly huge impact on high-speed trains running across Spain for most of Monday.

Here are the accounts from three affected passengers:

Trapped in a tunnel

Álvaro Agustín spent a weekend in his hometown of Gijón, before returning to Valencia, where he worked as a doctor.

Sometime after leaving the northern Spanish city, his train entered the tunnel and stopped. Agustín, 26, thought it would be a brief delay, a familiar six-hour journey. He waited, and then waited for more. Two hours passed without any news.

Finally, train staff informed passengers of the power problem and said they did not know when to resolve it. An hour later, a group of soldiers arrived at the emergency room, distributed water, and shared news about the power outage in Spain and Portugal. They also said that they did not know when to restore power.

Eventually, the bathroom toilet was clogged, its odor penetrated into the car and forced the passengers to secure their shirt to their nose. Then the train's emergency battery ran out and crashed Agustín's car into the darkness. As people try to protect their precious power, there is not even light on the screen of a phone.

“Outside, even if they don't have the internet, they're in the sun, and we don't know what's going on in the dark,” Agustin said after returning to Gicon in the early hours of the morning.

Most passengers remain calm. Some even laughed and started singing to celebrate the holidays. But a 15-year-old girl began to suffer from an anxiety attack. Agustín removed the stethoscope to check her. He then talks to her and gives her advice to help her control her breathing and calm her down.

The train in Agustín stopped for nine hours and an auxiliary locomotive arrived for the passenger's rescue and took it to the nearest city.

Waiting in Barcelona

When Paquita González, 53, arrived at Barcelona's main railway station on Monday, the service had been suspended. She hoped that the interference would be short-lived, and she stayed, hoping to ride another train to her home on Kadubu in the south of the country.

After a few hours, nothing changed. Gonzalez lies on the terminal floor all night but the pressure is too tight to hit.

“It's hard tonight, I'm older,” she said the next morning. “There are kids who try to sleep on the exposed floor.”

As of noon Tuesday, she was exhausted and still waiting for a place on the train – trying to get to her destination along with hundreds of other frustrated travelers.

“One day I'm waiting,” Gonzalez said in tears. “I’ve been here for over 15 hours.”

Card Game and Unity

Erika Sánchez was taking a high-speed train in Barcelona to Madrid when her partner sent her a message about “strange things” at work: colleagues throughout Spain were losing power.

Shortly thereafter, her train stopped in the “middle everywhere” – the forest was everywhere, but the town was not visible.

The conductor announced that he would open the door to allow air circulation and save battery power by shutting off the train.

A few hours have passed. Sánchez plays cards with her seat neighbors and chats with older women, who she says reminds them of the difficult times they encountered in their youth. Others shared the electricity bank, and that there was little food around them with the team.

She added: “The people who work on the train do a great job and try to distribute food and water to everyone.”

Six hours later, the train began to move and passengers cheered. They arrived at a station in Guadalajara, 70 kilometers (44 miles) south of Madrid, where another train was transferred. In the nearby gymnasium, volunteers provided food to some of the 800 passengers, many of whom were preparing to spend the night on the floor.

Sánchez is ready to do the same thing until a young woman is willing to take her to Madrid. At 3 a.m., she was 12 hours later than expected.

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Barcelona-based Associated Press photographer Emilio Morenatti contributed to the report.