Seabound Journeys · Escola Europea
The railway is the great forgotten mode of transport
Ricardo González Iglesias
Transport and Logistics Teacher · IES María Ana Sanz, Pamplona
How central should intermodality be in today’s vocational training programmes?
Intermodality is fundamental — and it is so for several reasons. The main one is simply how the global economy works. Globalisation has interconnected all productive processes at a worldwide scale, and the transport sector’s answer to that reality is, necessarily, intermodal. Spain’s particular geography makes it even more critical here. We have thousands of kilometres of Atlantic and Mediterranean coastline, which makes intermodal solutions absolutely essential. The only mode we barely touch is inland waterway, for obvious geographic reasons — but everything else is critical. For me, it is a matter of state policy.
You are, by your own admission, a man from inland Spain — Madrid, Pamplona, Zamora. Does geography condition how students and teachers approach international logistics?
It absolutely does. In Madrid, courses lean heavily towards the logistics side — warehousing, distribution — because of the city’s role as a southern European hub and the weight of Barajas airport. In Pamplona, I see a different picture: lots of transport companies, lots of industry with its own in-house traffic departments. More local, more externalised, very outward-looking. I have colleagues teaching in Benavente, where everything revolves around road haulage because it is a major road junction in the northwest. Territory shapes everything — including the implicit pressure to teach whichever mode dominates locally.
The railway is often called the great forgotten mode. How can it be genuinely integrated into vocational curricula?
There are two sides to this. The first is the teaching profession itself. Rail has historically been an opaque, closed sector. Teachers simply have not had access to deep knowledge they could then pass on. With road, sea, and air, companies always maintained dialogue with schools. With rail, there was no interlocutor. There was Renfe, and nothing else. Liberalisation has changed things somewhat, but it is still very difficult for teachers to access that knowledge.
Context · SURCO Training Programme
The Escola Europea – Intermodal Transport organises immersive railway courses in collaboration with regional authorities. Ten places were reserved for secondary school teachers from Navarra, with Ricardo as a potential ambassador for teacher recruitment.
Ferroutage: lorries loaded onto rail wagons
RoRo loading operations · MOST Training
What can students take away from an immersive experience like this one that a classroom simply cannot provide?
The most important thing is a global vision. Our training modules are structured around individual modes of transport in isolation — and in doing so, we often lose the thread of the supply chain as a single, unbroken whole. Last night, watching lorries drive into the ship, you were seeing intermodality live. You cannot replicate that in a classroom. What students gain here is the realisation that the supply chain is one — whether it involves rail, truck or vessel. Those grey zones — the port, the inland container depot, the rail terminal — are exactly where everything connects. And until students stand in those places, they often do not fully understand them.
How do you see the teacher’s role evolving in an era of artificial intelligence and constant technological change?
There will be two kinds of teachers: those who adapt and those who are overtaken by technology. I was talking yesterday with a friend who is an editor in Barcelona — he told me that in three or five years his job might not exist. The same applies to us. We are no longer the keepers of the knowledge grail. The monopoly on information has gone. From that point, our role must be to guide: to work on competencies, habits of mind, learning how to learn. Students will be in continuous formation for the rest of their working lives. With us they will spend one or two years; then they will be learning on their own. That does not mean losing authority. It means changing our role.
What would you like your students to take with them — and what would you like them to say about these two years, a decade from now?
Above all: critical thinking. The ability to discern what is information and what is not, what matters and what does not, will be the defining skill. And alongside that: autonomy. My father began his career in a bank crossing buy and sell orders by hand, and retired using email. Fifty years of brutal change. The change awaiting my students is far faster. As for what I would like them to say about me after ten years — if they say “that man was right”, that is enough for me.
