This week Europe has confirmed its commitment to the Mediterranean corridor with an important subsidy for the route between Vandellòs and Castelló valued at 27.9 million euros for the UIC standard gauge implementation project on a 150 kilometer railway section between both towns.
It is one of the routes currently under construction for the railway infrastructure, closely monitored by the Quiero Corredor platform in its usual semi-annual analysis and which also affects passenger traffic, as especially perceived by Euromed users. The main benefit of the project will be, according to the EC, to contribute to the deployment of the European gauge network in Spain, a challenge to be solved since the coexistence of two different gauges on the Spanish network is one of its main bottlenecks.
The European subsidy will pay for a little less than half of the work, whose award in December 2021 was budgeted at 66.6 million euros in total. For Adif, it is one of the most important works for the development of the Mediterranean corridor as a strategic axis for the promotion of rail transport and the socioeconomic development of the Mediterranean arc and its area of ??influence.
The European reading is also in this line, as it has granted aid within the framework of the “Connecting Europe” Mechanism (MCE), the EU instrument for strategic investment in transport infrastructure. In total, there are 6,200 million euros for a total of 107 projects, six of which are located in Spain.
Of these six Spanish projects benefited by the CE, the one in Vandellòs-Castelló is not the only investment linked to the Mediterranean corridor that receives European support in this call, since the port of Algeciras is also part of the Mediterranean corridor, which has support in the project coordinated by the Port Authority and which will receive 6.7 million euros.
This involves the design and deployment of an On-shore Power Supply (OPS) system in the port of Algeciras, and in particular in the extension of the north dock, in the “detached dock”, in the Juan Carlos I container terminal. pier and outside pier of Isla Verde. The Antequera-Bobadilla-Algeciras line is common to the coastal and central Mediterranean corridor and has been under construction for years.
The third Spanish investment linked to the Mediterranean corridor is the secure parking for trucks in Murcia, a project coordinated by its Ministry of Development and Infrastructure. The project will receive 4.9 million euros for the construction of a safe and secure parking area of ??415 lots in the Mediterranean corridor along the Murcia-Almería section.
Here the European Commission establishes that the main benefits of the project will be “the improvement of the safety of parked trucks and that of road safety”.
In this call, the Commission also allocates aid to improve road traffic. In the case of the Mediterranean corridor, it also obtains resources -in a specific item coordinated from France- for improving the efficiency, interoperability and safety of road traffic.
It does so within the “Mediterranean-Atlantic Transport Intelligent Systems” project, which obtains 62 million to deploy ITS Smart Advanced solutions that cover three TEN-T corridors (including the Mediterranean, but also the Atlantic corridor, and the Mediterranean North Sea ) in four countries, France, Italy, Portugal, and also in Spain.
Other projects subsidized by the EC also linked to the Mediterranean corridor in its European layout are the one for a parking lot for heavy vehicles on the A1 motorway in Slovenia (3.2 million), within the Mediterranean basic network corridor; as well as the study project (4.9 million) for the improvement and construction of a new 72 km double track railway in the Skradnik-Krasica-Tijani section, in Croatia, in the integral railway network of the same corridor.
The indisputable European commitment to the Mediterranean corridor, which experts place at the center of the concerns of the European Commission, involves solving bottlenecks such as the coexistence of two different gauges, a situation that is also addressed in other European territories such as Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, where this call for aid will also serve to finance the change of track gauge in their infrastructures.
