Spain which entered the high-speed era in 1992 with the opening of the Madrid-Seville line and is now the most ambitious country in Europe in the rate of growth of its high-speed network. Having just completed the Madrid to Barcelona line, Spain now has 1,600km of high speed line in operation, with another 2,200 under construction and 1,700km planned.
A key construction project is the line north from Barcelona into the French Sud-Est line. This line is of particular significance for European high-speed rail policy for reasons other than its 17 mile tunnel and the link between the Spanish and French networks which it brings. An intense debate is taking place between the Spanish, Catalan and French authorities as to whether the line will carry freight or be passenger only. The Catalan transport minister told me he was pressing strongly for it to be a mixed freight and passenger line, to take lorries off the route north and boost the economic dividend from the line. For the line to carry mixed traffic, however, requires not only a departure from French high-speed practice: it also has a major bearing on the engineering of the line, as it would need shallower gradients, and therefore also on its cost north of the French border, to which, politely, the French have suggested that the Spanish and/or Catalan governments might wish to contribute if they want the much costlier option. Here again the freight issue is rearing its head fairly starkly.
However, the most remarkable feature of Spanish high-speed rail is the sheer scale and rapidity of its development, in a country without an especially strong prior railway tradition. There is a debate about whether the lines were built in the right order. It was clearly a political decision by Philipe Gonzales to build the first line from Madrid to his home town of Seville – the deal is said to have been that Barcelona got the 1992 Olympics in return. But Barcelona now has its line too, and the Spanish government in 2005 published a national high-speed plan with a target of 10,000km of high-speed line by 2020 connecting all the nation’s provincial capitals, accounting for 90% of the population [show slide 3]. It estimates that the cost will be met from allocating 1.5% of GDP to national infrastructure until 2020, which it projects – with additional revenue from concessions – to give a cumulative investment budget of 250bn Euros of which half – yes, half – will go to rail. Spain will be spending 10bn Euros on rail infrastructure investment this year alone, 6bn of it on new high-speed lines. These figures are simply mind-boggling: Network Rail’s has a £10bn budget for capacity enhancement for the next five years. The Spanish Transport Minister told me: “A high-speed fever has taken over the country,” perhaps the most expensive fever in Spanish history.
However, the Spanish are delighted with the results. They are particularly pleased by the initial success of the Madrid to Barcelona line, which only opened last February, with a fastest journey time of 2 hours 38 minutes for the 386 miles, about to come down further to 2 hours 15 minutes. When the service started a few months ago rail had only 16% of the combined train and air market; now [show slide 4] it has 48 per cent, and they expect this to rise to 70% or higher before long, which accords with the experience on similar lines such as London to Paris and Brussels. The load factor on these AVE services is also a high 65%.The traffic on the new AVE line to Malaga is starting to build up and is already taking large numbers of passengers from the domestic airlines.
No comments:
Post a Comment