One additional problem for Spanish-French train connections is a cockfight between RENFE and SNCF.
It's a longer tragedy in several acts. RENFE is definitely the less efficient company of the two (Symptomatic: You can't even look up connections on their web 🙄). But in this recent drama, respondibility is probably at least shared.
If somebody knows better, please correct me:

In the EU (remember, some stuff in the EU is nice, but a lot also neoliberal bullshit), the countries are "encouraged" to privatise national rail companies and to allow competition.
The French SNCF became annoyed by RENFE trains starting to cover some of the more revenue-generating routes*.
So, SNCF just kicked RENFE out and didn't allow them to operate on French rails anymore. RENFE would have liked to do the same, but luckily for the cross-border connection, they couldn't.
In Spain, the infrastructure is operated by ADIF, RENFE runs only the trains (as France is one of the big players in the EU, SNCF is allowed to retain the authority over the tracks and to play both roles).
So the two broke ties and stopped any cooperation. So no mutual ticket selling or anything...

Things are starting to improve again, apparently. RENFE ads are announcing "breaking: there will be a new connection Barcelona-Paris" (in reality, just starting to recover the connections that four years ago were totally normal).

* here is obviously a flaw in my version of the story, as SNCF has apparently less of a problem with DB and others...

#RENFE #SNCF #Trains #TGV #AVE #EuropeRailway #Interrail
@quixoticgeek @jon