Recently in Spain Category

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.

The Ministry of Transport approved yesterday the tendering for the construction of the substructure of the line Toril- Río Tiétar, which is part of the High Speed Line between Madrid - Extremadura - Portuguese border. The section has a length of 10.7 kilometers and is budgetted 1.1 million euros with a 12 month term, according to the Ministry. Other sections of the line are currently under construction, and with 76.7 km of works is currently valued 188 million euros, for Cáceres-Aldea del Cano, Aldea del Cano-Mérida, Mérida-Montijo y Montijo-Badajoz.

The entire corridor is scheduled to be in service in 2016 and has ASFA-200 and ERTMS as protection systems.

Source: Hoy

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.

"We had expected it to be mostly business travelers on this line," says Julio Hermida, a spokesman for Renfe, the state train operator. "But we're finding it's just as busy on the weekends," as Barcelona residents discover Madrid and vice-versa, despite a long-lived rivalry between the two cities. "To some extent, it's changing the way people think about each other."

Not everyone is pleased. ETA, the militant Basque separatist group, has said it would target anyone involved in the construction of a high-speed train line that will connect the restive northern region with Madrid and France. In December, ETA killed the owner of a company working as a contractor on the project, and in February detonated a bomb at the headquarters of Ferrovial SA, another contractor working on the project.

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. Starved of funds, 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.

Critics say the AVE will never stop losing money. Even its backers say high-speed rail can only be economical if the state bears much of the construction costs. But they say the train's benefits-lower greenhouse-gas emissions, less road congestion and, in Spain's case, greater social cohesion and economic mobility-make it an investment worth making.