There are also daily direct flights to all main European airports, but their schedules don't follow any special pattern. Flight takes about 45 minutes. They are very frequent and give a money back guarantee if the delay is bigger than 5 minutes. Other touristic cities like Toledo, Avila or Segovia are within a range of about 1-1.5 hours by train, bus or car from Madrid. Therefore the date and hour of the train the passenger has to take is fixed.
Quality is similar to west European trains.
Intercity buses are very cheap, but sometimes different companies have different stations in the same city. Automatic cars are rare. Signaling is standard European. In roads with shoulders you will many times find a slow vehicle lane on the right when going uphill, so there are two lanes going uphill and one going downhill. Public city transportation is efficient and cheap.