The sketch of the new accesses to the port of Barcelona has been drawn for decades, but the initial drawing with a marker then requires work with a fine-pointed pencil that had not yet been done in the nearly thirty years that have passed since the Delta plan was approved in 1994. In that macro-project that designed the expansion of the port and the airport of El Prat, made a reality some time ago, there was also the construction of a new motorway and an entrance railway axis to the port of Barcelona through the old course of the Llobregat river.
Although in these almost thirty years several proposals have been evaluated and the foundation stone was even laid for one of them – although without continuity -, the Ministry of Transport believes that it has found the best formula to fit the new road and rail accesses and has given the go-ahead to the basic project, to which La Vanguardia has had access and on which the technicians of the numerous administrations involved have worked side by side for two and a half years: the ministry (especially the road division), the Railway Infrastructure Administrator (Adif), Ports de l’Estate, the port of Barcelona, ??Ferrocarrils de la Generalitat (FGC) and the Department of Territory of the Generalitat.
All these institutions signed a collaboration protocol on October 7, 2020 and all have given their approval to the final document, in which it is committed to unifying road and rail entry through the same point. “The accesses reach the port through a very limited space with the river on one side, ships on the other, electrical installations and gas pipelines below…”, explains the general secretary of Infrastructure. The drafting team of the basic project was forced to look for ingenious solutions and ended up opting to make a sandwich with the tracks of the FGCs in the entry section to the port infrastructure itself, with the cars above and the trains of goods arriving from the Mediterranean corridor below.
At the most complicated point, the accesses will be boxed in with the Llobregat river on one side, the industries of the Free Trade Zone on the other and the routes of Rodalies and the AVE above, as you can see in the infographic below page In this way, everything will enter through the same place, with a viaduct for cars and trucks, just below – at ground level – the FGC road, and further down, underground, the two new roads of the railway access with international and Iberian width. “It’s not the usual solution, but the lack of space has forced us to look for this type of imaginative solutions”, points out Flores. This is how it surrounds an electrical substation that in previous plans stood in the way of the accesses and whose relocation would have delayed another five to seven years, a work that is already late enough.
The construction project will go out to tender between September and October if the electoral cycle does not alter it, and will involve two more years of technical work developing the initial idea embodied in the basic project, in which it has been defined that the road accesses they will be nearly 10 kilometers in total length. They will start near Sant Joan Despí as an extension of the A-2, which will also serve to improve entrances and exits in a very congested area and will connect with the Llobregat junction in Sant Boi, another work that has long been vindicated , projected for the Olympic Games, abandoned at the beginning of the century and expected to be reactivated in the summer. At the height of Cornellà the new road will be separated on both sides of the A-2 and at the height of the Mercabarna bridge it will be unified over the railway accesses to enter the heart of the port through the infrastructure at three levels (road, FGC and railway). In the entire route, both where there is space for envelopes and where it is boxed, the motorway will have two lanes in each direction.
Regarding the railway accesses, the whole section will be double-track with mixed width (standard and Iberian) designed exclusively for goods. On the one hand, it will connect with a single-track access branch to Can Tunis and, on the other, with a ring route in the expanded area of ??the port. In total, 3.4 kilometers of tracks, most of which are covered, and some small sections between screens.
The overall budget is 591 million euros, to which 66.5 more must be added corresponding to some expropriations that are necessary to pass the new roads in the industrial area and another 31 million for the infrastructure of the inside the railway triangle. In total, nearly 700 million euros in about three years of works. If nothing is delayed, they should be a reality between 2028 and 2029.
The document that explains all this was expected for last summer, but the technical complexity has extended the deadlines much longer than initially anticipated. With the intention of making up for lost time, the ministry has found a way to start some works, even if they are neither the motorway nor the new railways themselves. The plan is to start work on the affected services next year. That is, all the diversions of cables, pipes and other issues that have to be modified to accommodate the new infrastructure. It may seem like a small thing, but in an industrial and complex environment like this, with a lot of services affected, there is work for at least two years before we start building the harbor accesses, the same time as it will take time to draft the construction projects.
It is not the most usual way to proceed, but Flores already tried it successfully in his previous stage, in the Generalitat, together with the current director general of Bimsa, Ricard Font. At that time they decided to move forward with the work on service diversions affected by the construction of the FGC L8 extension tunnel. In this way, they managed to move cables and pipes in Carrer Urgell and Gran Via from January 2022 so that when the tunnel construction works begin at the end of the summer, all this work will be done.
In the case of access to the port, we are talking, for example, about the construction of a passable gallery under Carrer 40 in the Free Trade Zone that will accommodate gas pipelines, oil pipelines and high voltage lines. In that same street, it will also be necessary to divert water supply pipes from Agbar, collectors of the Consorci de la Zona Franca, lighting and underground telecommunications circuits. It will also be necessary to reposition the water injection pipe treated by the desalination plant of the Aigua Ter-Llobregat (ATL) water supply body right at the point where the river was diverted two decades ago to expand the port. In that section, the pipeline will have to be diverted a few meters through which the water already treated in the desalination plant travels 12 kilometers upstream to the distribution station of La Fontsanta, in Sant Joan Despí, to reach the network of potable water.
These first works will entail an initial investment of around 15 million euros, to which more will be added later, since the budgeted bill for the replacement of affected services rises to 77 million in total, including the replacement of the via dels FGC, which will have to be rebuilt in the new scheme and will be compatible with a possible duplication if the Catalan public company wants to take advantage of it.
The signing of the financing agreement was expected to take place in the summer, but the election call has forced it to be postponed until autumn. At the ministry, they are working with the idea of ??being able to sign it at the same time that the drafting of the construction projects goes out to public competition. The administrations involved are then expected to leave in writing the money each will put into it. The provisional documents divide the financial contributions into three parts, about 270 million in charge of Adif; 250 million from the Ministry’s General Directorate of Roads, and another 200 million from the Port of Barcelona.
