A technical incident has stopped the first Avril AVE in Galicia for approximately an hour, a few meters from the Ourense station. The train, which left Vigo minutes before 9:30 a.m., was heading to the city of Burgas after passing through Santiago. However, at one point, it stopped around 11:10 a.m.
After several minutes of stoppage, the public address system notified the almost 500 passengers who were on board that a technical incident had caused this stoppage. The AVE arrived at the Ourense station powered by the tail locomotive. The train, which was running with a delay of more than an hour when leaving Ourense, recorded an occupancy rate of close to 98% during the entire journey.
Without light inside, during the incident many users began to ask for buses to take them to their destination cities.
For its part, the first AVE service that connected Asturias with Madrid, which left the Gijón station at 6:00 a.m., circulated with almost full seat occupancy and the first from Madrid to Asturias arrived in Gijón 15 minutes late. On routes to Galicia, Renfe has sold more than 109,000 tickets, as reported by the Ministry of Transport and Sustainable Mobility last week. Adding the trips to Asturias, the figure can be around 200,000.
The high-speed train (AVE) that completes the route between Madrid and the Galician capitals and debuts in Asturias starts after more than three years of delays in the delivery of Talgo trains. The new convoys offer more seats and services to destinations that until now were not connected by high speed, such as Oviedo, Gijón, Vigo, A Coruña, Santiago de Compostela, Pontevedra and Vilagarcía de Arousa.
The incorporation of these trains into the fleet allows Renfe to reassign convoys and expand its services in nine autonomous communities (Extremadura, Madrid, Castilla-La Mancha, Castilla y León, Andalusia, Catalonia, the Valencian Community, La Rioja and Aragón), in which will offer more than 20,000 new places weekly.