Barcelona – Secretary of State for Transport and former President of Adif, the state company that manages railway infrastructure, Isabel Pardo de Vera and the president of Renfe, the Spanish railway company, Isaias Taboasresigned from their post last Monday after the scandal surrounding trains designed too high to enter tunnels became known in the press at the end of January.
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Trains that are too wide do not go through tunnels
Loud calls for resignations from the Autonomous Communities affected by the planning error, Cantabria and Asturias, provoked and welcomed by Transport Minister Raquel Sánchez in an attempt to calm the waves.
RESIGNATION
Therefore, the sacrifice of two intermediate positions by Renfe and Adif in recent days has not been enough to eliminate what has been defined, in the words of Miguel Ángel Revilla, President of Cantabria, as “a mess, a botched affair”. The facts that tell the story of “one of the biggest railway fiascos of recent years” date back to 2020, when Renfe committed to renewing the fleet of vehicles running on the rail network managed by Feve, with 31 new trains, of which 21 are intended for Cantabria and 10 for Asturias, the introduction of which should have reduced the average age of those in circulation from 28 to 15 years. It is indeed an old 19th century network that has struggled for over two decades, with trains operating for up to 40 years and often at risk of accidents. The Basque company Caf wins the contract to design and build the trains for 258 million euros, the contract specifies the execution, manufacture and maintenance time at 220 months. The café soon realizes Renfe’s mistake in the dimensions given in the tender: the trains are actually designed 20 centimeters higher than the network’s tunnels can accommodate, precisely because the tunnels in this network are lower than usual. It’s a design flaw, the machines haven’t been built yet so not a dime was spent. But now the cost is mounting to fix the problem and there will be a delay of at least a couple of years in deliveries when the first new trains are due to arrive next year.
THE PROBLEM
In the first months of 2021, the problem was reported by the successful bidder, so Adif and Renfe must have known about it for a long time, the story was hushed up for two years. The transport minister, who was appointed head of the department a few months later and was officially unaware of the matter at the time of the journalistic exposure, acknowledged the problem in early February and promised an internal investigation, which is still ongoing, to assign responsibilities determine the ‘happening. Possible solutions are explored. The hypothesis of widening the tunnels was immediately discarded as the operation would take much more time and be very expensive. Therefore, in order not to limit the interior space of the trains for passengers, it is thought to use the so-called “comparison method”, used in other countries but never in Spain, according to which the new machines will replicate the dimensions of one of the trains in service to create new ones Avoiding errors and reducing production times as much as possible. The right design will be finalized for the summer. The first new trains will be ready in 2026 and until then the Ministry guarantees free local rail services in Cantabria and Asturias, as requested by the respective regional presidents, although this measure will apply in the rest of Spain until the end of 2023. In addition, the new trains will be seven more than the original 31, and the ministry will appoint a commissioner to oversee the completion of the project.
A similar mess as in Spain happened in France in 2014. At that time, trains were built that were too wide to pass the platforms of the older stations. However, since in this case the trains were already built, the tracks had to be changed at additional cost.
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