First there were the tracks on which the Rodalies trains run underground some time ago, then the large structure of the macrostation that will one day have a bright lobby under a showy pergola, and now it’s time for the plant superior, where the high-speed trains will pass. The Sagrera works, after too many years at idle or downright paralyzed, are progressing at a constant and clearly visible pace.
The huge cranes that are helping to build the slab for the roof of the future station these days already allow you to get an idea of ??the gigantic magnitude of the project and firmly believe that one day the Sagrera will be a reality. For now, the works have reached 70% of the execution of the entire structure and accesses, according to the railway infrastructure administrator (Adif). The lower level is already finished and now the central lobby and the upper level remain. Technically, the work has entered the last phase.
The major milestone of this final stage of works, which will not be short, will consist of the diversion of high-speed trains through the interior of the Sagrera. It is expected to be at the end of 2024, if nothing goes wrong, when the cover will be finished and the first route of the AVE will be operational. Its entry into service will also include the first half of the Sagrera logistics area, with half a dozen tracks for cleaning, catering and other high-speed services. “It is one of the most innovative areas of the project, there is nothing like it at any station in Spain”, highlights Alberto Alcañiz, the head of Adif in charge of the works. It is an area that Renfe is desperately waiting for due to the collapse of the six tracks at the Sants station, which has clearly become smaller since the entry of several operators into the Madrid-Barcelona corridor after the liberalization of the railway sector.
The second high-speed line will be put into service one year after the first, at the end of 2025, or the beginning of 2026 at the latest. At that moment, the tracks on the outer route will definitely disappear, as happened previously with the Rodalies lines, first the Mataró one and then the Granollers one. Until that moment arrives, the high-speed trains that go from Barcelona to Girona and Figueres and those that connect with France will continue to be forced to travel on the single track between the Catalan capital and Mollet del Vallès, as they have done since the beginning of ‘year without major problems, although if one day there is a technical incident in the infrastructure, the service will have to be completely interrupted irreparably.
The final transfer of the AVE tracks inside the Sagrera, two and a half years from now, will be accompanied by the commissioning of the logistics area, which will have ten tracks in total. It will be then when the Sagrera railway work as such can be completed. From that moment on, all trains will run inland, although without stopping. The Sants station will notice this in an important way, because the logistics tasks will be able to be transferred entirely to the Sagrera, although passengers will continue to be unable to get on and off at this station, as is already the case for passengers on the R1 lines and R2 from Rodalies, who lean against the train windows and see the inside of the terminal, still without escalators or the basic elements of a station.
For this, it will still be necessary to award the construction works of the architectural part, and the project of Fermín Vázquez’s studio, on which the famous architect and his team have been working for two years, will become a reality. This scenario still does not have a completion date, perhaps towards the end of the decade, but no Adif manager dares to formalize it in public after so many unfulfilled schedules since the beginning, 13 years ago.
In that undetermined future, the enormous linear park planned for the roof of the station will also have to be realized, which will cover what for many years was an urban scar with a green space equivalent to five blocks of the Eixample. Through this park you will access the pergola and the unique entrance planned for the railway space, with a huge hall from where you can go down to the lower area to take Rodalies and go up to the upper area to take the high speed trains. For Alcañiz, this is the point of “most complexity” in the final phase of the works that are now starting.
Since imagining all this finished still requires a certain amount of imaginative effort, Adif is applying augmented reality for the first time to the works of the Sagrera. Those responsible for the project combine this with BIM (Building Information Modeling) technology, which makes it possible to put all the details of the work in a computer system and coordinate all the companies involved, a fundamental issue in a project with so many contracts progressing in parallel. lol The centralization of all work plans in a single document accessible in the cloud is probably one of the most important advances in recent years, even if it is not very visible, and has revolutionized the construction sector and others like it, such as the preparation of the halls of Fira de Barcelona.
In the case of the Sagrera, the use of augmented reality allows those responsible for the work to focus on the work in situ with a tablet or even with a mobile phone and visualize on the screen what that same place will be like in the future, with the roads and all the infrastructure finished. In this way, possible errors or setbacks that are not easy to detect among so much work can be anticipated.
