Buying a train is not like buying a car at the dealership. From the moment it is commissioned until it enters service, several years pass no matter how quickly you want to go. For this reason, the CEO of Transports Metropolitans de Barcelona (TMB), Xavier Flores, fears a delay in the public tender of the 22 new trains necessary for the central section of line 9.
If the Government of Pere Aragonès does not do it before the elections, the bizarre situation could arise that the endless works with more than a decade of delay will end up coming to an end but the opening will have to be delayed because the Generalitat has not bought time the trains that TMB will later manage.
“It is an essential and extremely urgent operation, the Government is not yet in office, it can be put out to tender tomorrow, there is no impediment to doing so,” Flores assured this Thursday at a conference on public transport financing organized by the Col·legi d ‘Enginyers de Camins and Enginyers Industrials de Catalunya, delving forcefully into an issue that he already pointed out in the interview with La Vanguardia last Sunday.
To meet the schedule of opening the first stations on the central section of L9 in 2027, the new convoys should be purchased now. An example is the 50 new trains acquired from Alstom to retire the convoys left with asbestos. They were ordered in 2019, they began to arrive slowly at the company’s garages in 2023 and they will not all be operational until the end of this year.
The entry into service of these new trains will also require more time than usual due to their technical complexity. The CEO of TMB estimates a year of testing before they can be put into service. “We know how to extend it, open new stations too, but connecting two automatic lines gives a certain vertigo,” Flores acknowledged.
This forecast for a few years is what sector experts also demand in a broader sense. The director of the Metropolitan Transport Authority (ATM), Manuel Valdés, assures that “to guarantee the efficiency of the system, year-by-year planning should be left behind and have a multi-year financing plan valid for at least four years, although The desirable thing would be ten years from now.”
Valdés has just taken up his position and has the difficult challenge of completing the deployment of T-Mobilitat, a tool with great possibilities that have not yet been exploited. Valdés has no shortage of desire and neither does he lack ideas. One possibility that he has pointed out is the bonus for trips made outside of rush hour to alleviate congestion at peak times and improve the efficiency of the system.
