A passenger boards with a ticket from twenty-eight years ago

Twelve nights left. The 803 pulls out of Ribadeña at 23:40 with its lights on, fifty-two clean seats and not one passenger inside: the operator stopped selling tickets on Monday and on the 31st they lift the track.

Olalla Berruezo, the inspector on this line for eleven years, walks the aisle exactly as she did when it ran full. She has been told to, in writing. The contract with the regional government requires the service to be covered until the last day, and covering the service means the train leaves, she rides inside with the punch in her pocket, and Fermín Aizpún, the driver who retires on the 31st itself, takes it to Puente Alcor and brings it back.

"Twelve," Fermín says over the intercom the moment they set off.

"Twelve," she answers.

It is the only thing they have come up with to avoid talking about anything else.

At 23:52 they pass Sotoclaro without braking. At 00:06 the long straight begins, the one that runs beside the river, and Olalla sits down in row nine because from there she can see both doors. She has spent eleven years never sitting down on a run.

At 00:11 she feels the train brake.

Vallonga is a halt with two short platforms and a sheet-metal shelter, closed in 2011, when the district lost every stop that did not reach ten passengers a day. It has no light. It has no ticket window. It does not even appear on the control panel: as far as the system is concerned, there is nothing between Sotoclaro and Ermua del Río.

The 803 stops there for thirty seconds. Door two opens.

A woman of about seventy climbs aboard, in a navy coat buttoned to the top, with a stiff handbag and an umbrella she does not need tonight. She wipes her feet on the step before coming in and walks up the aisle to row four.

"Good evening," she says. "I am going to Puente Alcor."

"Madam." Olalla has stood up so fast that she has dropped the punch. "This train does not carry passengers. No tickets have been sold since Monday."

"I know that."

"Then you understand: I cannot take you. I have to call it in on the radio and put you off at Ermua."

"You can do that," the woman says, and sits down. "I would know how to do my job too, if somebody ordered me to."

Her name is Amelia Sanchís. She says it without being asked, and adds the rest just as tidily, with an answer ready for days: retired schoolteacher, forty-one years at the school in Ribadeña, two whole generations of the district learned long division from her.

"I was a pupil of yours," Olalla says, and regrets it at once, because that complicates everything.

"Berruezo," says Amelia. "I know."

Olalla goes up to the cab. Fermín has one hand on the controller and his eyes fixed on the point where the headlights stop being any use.

"You stopped at Vallonga."

"I stopped at Vallonga."

"Vallonga has been closed for fourteen years."

"Fifteen," says Fermín. "And there are twelve nights left. Do you tell Mardones or do I?"

Serafín Mardones is the head of service, the man who signs the rosters and the disciplinary notes from an office a hundred and forty kilometres away. Neither of them calls him.

Olalla goes back into the carriage. Amelia has her bag open on her knees and is waiting for her with her hands still.

"I have to ask you for your full name and a document," Olalla says. "And even then I have to put you off."

"I am going to give you something else."

She takes out a paper envelope, the kind you sealed by wetting the flap, and out of the envelope she takes a ticket. Not a ticket of today, thermal paper and barcode. Thin card, with the name of the line printed in worn ink and the station boxes set out in a column.

Olalla takes it. The first thing she looks at, out of eleven years of habit, is the top right-hand corner, where the date goes.

"This is from twenty-eight years ago," she says.

"The fourteenth of November, 1998," says Amelia. "Ribadeña to Puente Alcor. Single."

"It has not been punched."

"It has not been punched," Amelia repeats, and settles into the seat with the calm of someone starting a long journey. "I have spent twenty-eight years waiting for somebody to punch it."