To sell his vision of a high-speed train network to the American public, President Barack Obama has cited Spain, a country most people do not associate with futuristic bullet trains. Yet the country is on track to bypass France and Japan to have the biggest network of ultrafast trains in the world by the end of next year, according to figures from the International Union of Railways and the Spanish government.

The growth of the Alta Velocidad Española, or AVE, is having a profound effect on life in Spain, where many people have been fiercely attached to their home regions and reluctant to live or even travel elsewhere. Those centuries-old habits are starting to change as Spain stitches its regions together with a €100 billion ($130 billion) system of 218-mile-an-hour bullet trains.

When Spain opened its first high-speed line, between Madrid and Seville, in 1992, critics said it would be a costly failure, but the AVE was a popular and political success. Politicians now fight for stations in their districts. Under the latest plan, nine out of ten Spaniards will live within 31 miles of a station by 2020.

Now, residents of Barcelona can be in Madrid in just over two-and-a-half hours -- a journey that takes about six hours by car. In the year since the Madrid-Barcelona line opened in February 2008, the AVE, costing passengers roughly the same as what they would pay to fly, has snatched half the route's air-passenger traffic.

Not everyone is pleased. ETA, the militant Basque separatist group, has said it would target anyone involved in the construction of a line that will connect the restive northern region with Madrid and France. ETA killed the owner of a company working on the project in December.

Other, nonviolent critics say the country's massive investment in high speed rail has come at the expense of other, less-glamorous forms of transportation. Spain's antiquated freight-train network has fallen into disuse, forcing businesses to move their goods around by road. That means the Spanish economy is unusually sensitive to changes in the price of crude oil.

And backers of the AVE say high-speed rail can only be economical if the state bears much of the construction costs. But they say the benefits -- lower greenhouse-gas emissions, less road congestion and, in Spain's case, greater social cohesion and economic mobility -- make it worthwhile. The AVE was originally designed for commutes between major cities around 300 miles apart.

But the biggest, and least expected, effect of the AVE has been on the smaller places in between, such as Ciudad Real. An AVE station that puts it just 50 minutes from Madrid has brought daily commuters to the town, and attracted a host of industries.

'The country is becoming far more intertwined', stated José María Ureña, a professor of city and regional planning at the University of Castilla-La Mancha. In a country that tends to separate out somewhat, that can only be a good thing.