One week away from the big event on the platform
"This trip today is very important because it will pave the way for the corridor to be completed," said Josep Vicent Boira, the Government's High Commissioner for the Mediterranean Corridor, who this morning enthusiastically looked at the sleepers from the cabin. The visit of the Secretary of State for Infrastructure, Isabel Pardo de Vera, motivated the trip on a laboratory train from Vallada station to the end of the tunnel at Font de la Figuera.
After the trip, what has been announced today is that the Iberian gauge railway line that joins Xàtiva-La Encina (unused until now despite the fact that its first sleeper was laid more than two decades ago) will temporarily adopt traffic between Valencia and Alicante.
ADIF will move here, from the first four months of 2023, freight traffic and the Cercanías lines, while work is being done to electrify the high-speed line, which runs parallel, to finally provide it with international gauge. The works will last two years, foreseeably, and have a total investment of 413 million euros.
“This is saving an island, that of Alicante, so that the Mediterranean corridor becomes a reality. No government has built more kilometers of corridor than this”, declared Pardo de Vera, who acknowledged that the platform “was hopeless” and has given two years to the works so that, finally, Valencia and Alicante are linked by international gauge.
Boira, for his part, highlighted that "the La Encina junction is the key to connecting the southeast and the northeast, as it connects all the works from the south to the north, especially on the Xàtiva-València line and then all the actions" .
Likewise, the visit to the works, in which the Government delegate, Pilar Bernabé, and the Minister of Territory, Rebeca Torró, also participated, has served for Adif to take stock of the works of the Mediterranean corridor, yes, in the last four years.
“In 2018 we had 11 sections blocked and today there are none blocked; we had three sections under construction and now we have 12 sections under construction. The change that has occurred, with projects in the portfolio, shows the progress that has been made”, said Josep V. Boira.
The general vision that Boira has exposed shows progress in all regions, especially in Catalonia due to its location to the north - "in 2018 the situation was more advanced, but there were sections totally blocked". In the Valencian Community in 2018 there were 163 kilometers completed and in 2022 there are 229.
"In these four years we have a positive balance, in 2018 we did not even know what we were going to do in 40% of the route and that is dramatic, but today we have 84% in project and 100% with previous studies", has listed.
Boira will also attend next week at the meeting that the platform
Precisely these first days of November, the platform has launched a video, to warm up engines for the event, in which it is denounced that the Mediterranean corridor is "the infrastructure that our country has been waiting for years, but it arrives by installments".
