The parsimonious journey of the AVE from Madrid to Galicia started 20 years ago with solemn inaugurations of the first sleepers and will arrive within a month after five failed official deadlines. This Tuesday the tickets will begin to be sold and on December 21 the line will be put into service, although its speed will not be the compromised one for the time being. The routes from Madrid to A Coruña, Santiago, Pontevedra and Vigo will last at least 20 minutes longer than planned because the variable gauge trains of the 106 series of Talgo, known as Avril, are not ready yet, the only ones that will allow to reduce the times to the max. The Ministry of Transport promised in October that this line will begin to operate “in summer.” This Monday he has not given any deadline.
The Minister of Transport, Raquel Sánchez, the sixth person who has passed through the position since the works began, has presided over “the first test trip” of the section with which the line is completed, a journey of 119 kilometers between Pedralba de la Pradería (Zamora) and the city of Ourense, which includes some thirty tunnels and as many viaducts. At the meeting, which ended with an act at the Ourense train station in which the speeches insisted on describing the Galician AVE as a “historic landmark”, “giant step” and “colossal work”, the presidents have signed up from Galicia and Castilla y León, regional councilors, the former Minister of Development for the PP Ana Pastor, the presidents of the councils of Ourense and Lugo and the mayors of their capitals, although high speed does not even reach the city of Lugo.
As of December 21, trips between Madrid and most of the Galician cities (they remain outside the Ferrol and Lugo line) will be reduced by a maximum of 1 hour and 28 minutes and a minimum of 54 minutes, depending on the case. . To go from the capital of Spain to Ourense it will take 2 hours and 15 minutes; to Santiago, 3 hours and 20 minutes; to A Coruña, 3 hours and 51 minutes; to Pontevedra, 4 hours; and to Vigo, 4 hours and 16 minutes. When the Avril trains arrive next year, these routes, except for Ourense, will be cut by 20 minutes, the ministry reports, figures that also fail to meet the last goal set by the Pedro Sánchez Government for 2021. According to that commitment now in the air, what Adif still discloses on YouTube, the trip to Vigo would last only 3 hours and 20 minutes.
The minister has also announced that, from December 21, daily services by direction will increase from 6 to 10 in the connections between the capital of Spain and A Coruña, Santiago and Ourense; from four to eight to go to Vigo; and from five to seven to travel to Pontevedra. The Galician president, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, has asked the Government in his speech that Avril trains that exceed 300 kilometers per hour begin to circulate on the Galician high-speed line before next summer to meet the demand of tourists for Xacobeo 2022.
As is customary for this type of premieres, Renfe will launch a campaign with 250,000 tickets for the new line at 15 euros each way, regardless of origin and destination, and on AVE and Alvia trains. These tickets can be purchased for two weeks (although they tend to run out in the first days) to travel between this December 21 and September 12, 2022.
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More investments in northwest
The presidents of Galicia and Castilla y León, both of the PP, have taken advantage of the act with the socialist minister to demand “the same impulse” to the rail freight connections in the northwest of Spain as in the Mediterranean strip. “We need the Government of Spain to look at the entire territory in the same way,” said Alfonso Fernández Mañueco, a Spaniard from Castilla. “The Atlantic Corridor, like the Mediterranean, also responds to a country strategy,” replied Raquel Sánchez. Feijóo has also demanded investments to connect Galicia with Lisbon by AVE.
The construction of the high-speed line has involved an investment in Galicia of almost 4,400 million and of 9,000 million in total in 16 years, after numerous partial inaugurations. The first sleeper was placed in 2001 with an institutional act chaired by José María Aznar, with Manuel Fraga as president of the Xunta and Francisco Álvarez Cascos carrying the Development portfolio. Since then, official celebrations of first sleepers and maiden voyages of each section have been chained for years. The first route baptized by the authorities as high speed in Galicia was 10 kilometers between Santiago and Ordes and it opened in 2003 with a speech by Mariano Rajoy as Vice President of the Government. That day the journey was not complete either: it lacked a tunnel.
If the summer deadline is met, Galicia will have the AVE committed just 30 years after Spain put into service its first high-speed line between Madrid and Seville. The multi-million dollar investment in fast trains to the Meseta has gobbled up the budget to remodel particularly outdated inland rail services, as unions, environmentalists and user platforms have continually stressed. To complete the 69-kilometer journey between A Coruña and Ferrol, convoys take an hour and twenty minutes to travel a single, non-electrified track whose route has been intact since the 19th century.
Arrival of the AVE to Chamartín
And another long-awaited railway project finally has a budget and a schedule. The board of directors of Adif Alta Velocidad has authorized, at its last meeting, to tender for the amount of 111.7 million euros the contract for the construction of the connection between the Madrid-Barcelona and Madrid-Levante high-speed lines, in the municipal term of Madrid. Thanks to this connection, the trains that circulate on the Madrid-Barcelona line will be able to reach the Madrid-Chamartín station, through the Atocha-Chamartín tunnel, using the Madrid-Levante line. Likewise, they will be able to access the future Atocha bus station.
The action has an execution period of 36 months, which will be ready, once the contract is awarded, in 2025. Currently the trains from Barcelona and Levante end their route at the Madrid-Puerta de Atocha station. Thanks to the new standard gauge tunnel between Puerta de Atocha and Chamartín station, trains from Levante will be able to continue their journey to Chamartín or continue to the north or northwest of the peninsula.
However, with the current track configuration, the Madrid-Barcelona services can only connect with the current tracks at Puerta de Atocha station. In order to guarantee the full functionality of this corridor, Adif AV is now putting out to tender the works to connect the Madrid-Barcelona line with the Madrid-Levante line.
It is a complex work. On the one hand, the connection between both high-speed lines is only possible in the triangle formed by the M-45 and M-5 highways and the Perales del Río neighborhood (Getafe). In addition, it entails certain technical complexity due to the presence of a multitude of infrastructures in addition to some natural spaces, Adif said in a statement.
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