In the year 2030, 67% of the rail traffic of the Mediterranean corridor that will circulate through Valencia will be “through”, with a forecast of 37 Long and Medium Distance units for that date. These are data from Adif that confirm that if there is no underground “through tunnel” in the city on those dates, rail traffic could reach a situation of “critical saturation”, according to sources from the Ministry of Public Works. One more fact: if you consult the Adif data, you can see that currently the most congested section of the corridor is precisely in the section between València and Sagunt.
The problem is that, as of today, there is no news of the project to execute a “through tunnel” in the capital that was announced in 2021, while other cities such as Barcelona, ??Madrid, Zaragoza or Castellón have had this underground circulation for a long time. . Furthermore, in the best of cases this tunnel could not be completed in time for it to be active in 2030, no matter how much the project’s actions are accelerated. However, by those dates rail traffic will have increased exponentially.
The València-Castelló is the second section of the Mediterranean corridor with the most Long Distance traffic, only surpassed by the La Encina-Villena section where the services of the corridor coincide with the connections from Madrid with Alicante, Murcia, Almería and Cartagena. New Murcia-Barcelona-Girona-Figueres AVE services are expected, a new liberalization scenario in the corridor (with companies like iryo that already operate on the Madrid-València section), new regional AVE services between Castelló and Alicante, new AVANT Media Distance and the possibility of night trains or an Alicante or Valencia-Paris service (now there is Barcelona-Lyon). Even looking to the future, new Almería-Figueres services are expected.
Regarding freight traffic through the Mediterranean corridor, growth is expected both in the Valencia-Sagunt section and through medium and long distance units. Attention should be paid to the new traffic generators: railway highway from Valencia plus the connections from Portugal and Madrid, plus the port of Valencia-port of Sagunt connection; the connections with PowerCo in Sagunt, or with Ford Almussafes, those that will link with the Cantabrian-Mediterranean corridor and, very importantly, the new northern terminal of the port of Valencia.
The prospect is so serious that the work plan (working document) of the European Coordination of the Mediterranean Corridor defines València as a bottleneck of the network. Furthermore, the requirement for the through tunnel is part of the Trans-European Transport Networks Regulation 2030, which should make this work a priority for the Spanish State. But, for now, that is not the case.
In October 2021, the Minister of Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda, Raquel Sánchez, presented the informative study of the railway axis that will cross the city underground and the new international gauge double platform between Castellón and València, both actions linked to the Mediterranean corridor. More than two years have passed and, at the moment, there is no news about the through tunnel, which should have already received the Environmental qualification for the document that contemplates three alternatives with important differences in cost and that range between 1,440 million euros, the most economical and the 2,265 million the most expensive.
The problem is that during this time important works have been approved. Two months ago, the Ministry of Transport and Sustainable Mobility announced the awarding of the works for the new through station for high-speed trains under the Atocha terminal. The contract for the drafting of the “functional study of the remodeling of the arterial railway network of Zaragoza and its adaptation to the circulations of the Zaragoza-Canfranc-Pau line” has also been approved. This contract says that “in particular, special attention will be paid to the urban railway section of Zaragoza that runs in a tunnel, as it is one of the sections with the highest traffic of the Spanish railway network and with the greatest potential for growth.”
On Friday, the new Minister of Transport, Óscar Puente, will be in Valencia
