The Mediterranean corridor has just completed ten years as a priority axis of the European Union. A coastal railway axis destined to «Jubilee »Spain radiatesl in favor of a circular rail network that exceeds the infrastructure designs with Madrid as kilometer zero of all means of transport. However, this European “priority” has not gone from paper to reality after a decade of planning, speeches, good words, demands and design changes that have hampered the execution of the railway axis called to connect the main Spanish ports from the border French to Algeciras.
The main obstacle to any advance in this decade has been that this cross-sectional design has continued to be executed radially. The investment effort of the central government has been destined to connect the main coastal cities with the center of the peninsula on high-speed lines, for passengers only. But it has not been completed from north to south or vice versa, neither for passengers nor for goods.
The first trans-European transport network (TEN-T) was set up in 1996 and has been revised twice: 2003 and 2011. The first high-speed lines began to be planned in Spain on December 9, 1988 when the Council of Ministers approved “to introduce the gauge international in newly built high-speed lines ». They are 25 and 33 years of planning, respectively, time lost to build an infrastructure along the coastline that will connect 44.5% of the Spanish Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and spaces that account for 66% of European GDP. In addition to serving the main trans-European ports of the first order: Barcelona, Tarragona, València, Cartagena and Algeciras.
This radial execution has allowed the main cities of the Mediterranean corridor to already have high-speed lines in service such as Barcelona (since 2008), Tarragona (2008), València (2010), Girona and Figueres (2013), Alicante (2013) and Granada (2019), but all in connection with Madrid. The long-awaited connection between all these cities and its continuity to Algeciras still does not materialize south of Tarragona.
South of the Ebro, the Mediterranean corridor is an entelechy. A string of sections congested by all types of circulations and of Iberian gauge in the Valencian Community, with the patchwork of the third thread – it allows circulations of trains of international gauge (1,435 mm) and Iberian gauge (1668 mm) – slowing down all circulations between Valencia and Castelló. An un-electrified track in Murcia and a chimera in Almería, Granada and Cádiz only visible in the planning power points that the former Minister of Development (2011-2016), Ana Pastor, criticized so much.
Some inexplicable delays despite the mobilization exerted by pressure groups such as the #Quierocorredor movement, promoted by the Valencian Association of Entrepreneurs (AVE), which today returns to the Ifema pavilion in Madrid to showcase social and business muscle and demand the rapid execution of the sections of the corridor that remain to be executed.
The #Quierocorredor movement complies five years of claims since in 2016 it began to demand the completion by 2025 of the “double international gauge railway platform that runs along the Mediterranean coast from the French border to Algeciras, linking all Mediterranean cities with each other, with the rest of the country and with Europe.” In order to monitor the progress of each section, since 2016, two semi-annual checks have been carried out on the real state of the corridor that have only confirmed the slow progress of this high-need railway platform. Despite the fact that the Mediterranean corridor has had a «government coordinator» for this infrastructure since January 2017: first the Catalan engineer Juan Barios Baquero (2017-2018) and then the Valencian geographer Josep Vicent Boira.
In these decades of planning it is especially bleeding the situation in the Region of Murcia. In this city, the Murcia Pact was signed on January 8, 2001, which approved the design of the new Madrid-Castilla-La Mancha-Murcia high-speed line. Twenty years after this proposed layout, which, of course, was born from kilometer zero of the Atocha station, the only capital that is still pending on the European gauge platform is the host city in which this work of the Iberian network was politically unblocked Of high speed.
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Although it was not officially part of the Murcia Pact but it was part of the Mediterranean corridor, the Murcia-Almería section also accumulates several decades of delay in recovering the rail connection that was lost in 1985 with the closure of the Almanzora railway. The drafting of the projects of the connection Almería-Granada (which also has a high-speed line) and Algeciras-Antequera, for which there is no date commitment for completion.
Other “cursed” section of the Mediterranean corridor has been the Castelló-Tarragona route, which has never been included in the design of high-speed lines in Catalonia or the Valencian Community. In 2009, the Ministry of Public Works awarded an informative study that never saw the light of day. And that included the single-track section of Vandellós, which was resolved with the start-up of the variant on January 13, 2020.
Reference-www.elperiodico.com