The greatest constructed railway tunnel in Spain for the passage of a High Speed train, inaugurated just over a year ago, is going to have to be reinforced. The tunnels of Guadarrama, opened in a hurry by the previous minister of Promotion, Magdalena Alvarez, for the passage of the AVE Madrid-Valladolid, the 22 of December of 2007, suffers water filtrations since last March, according to confirmed sources near Adif, the public society that manages railway infrastructures.
In particular one kilometer of the North entrance of one of the tunnels, i.e. the entrance located on the Segovia side, filtrations appeared as a result of the defrosting of the snow from last winter.
Although these leaks take place while the railway tunnels that are in operation, the situation forced Adif to contact with companies specialized in this type of deficiencies to realise "studies of preventive character", according to a statement.
The infrastructure manager wants to reinforce the measures of drainage and evacuation of waters coming from filtrations that exist at the moment in the Guadarrama tunnels.
The singularity of the orography of the tunnels, described by the public company like as "special characteristics", was one of the main causes of these filtrations. In the North side, that is the affected one by the leaks, an unevenness exists that, although with 0.002 likelihood, "tolerates a greater difficulty for the evacuation of waters coming from the filtrate", according to sources at Adif.
This situation generated water accumulations at some points in the tunnel. For this reason, and "to avoid possible situations that they could take place",a spokesman of Adif, the manager considered it to be "opportune" to reinforce the structure of the tunnels.
Until now, the circulation of the HS trains that cover the Madrid-Segovia-Valladolid line have not been affected by these deficiencies. The situation described by Adif is like "normal". No works are currently scheduled, according to Adif.
Sources near the company warned, however, that the objective is to divide the works in several sections to correct the filtrations, considering that these tunnels have a length of 28.4 kilometers, the fourth longest in Europe and fifth in the world.
The Guadarrama tunnels have previously suffered from dubst problems with test trains at an accident in one of the tunnels on the 6th of August 2003, which resulted in 34 workers being trapped in the tubes and the evacuation mechanism to be adapted. This, together with the reinforced concrete that had to be used on the walls, made the initial budget rise to 1,219 million euros and one year and five months of delay in opening.
Source: El Mundo
Leave a comment