The ship-train binomial for the management of the thousands of containers that arrive at Spanish ports every day is increasingly inseparable for the mobility, connectivity and sustainability plans of port infrastructures, which move more than 560 million per year. tons of merchandise.
Providing efficient, rapid and sustainable disposal of the more than 15 million containers that are estimated to circulate in and out of port facilities has become one of the key projects of ports such as those of Barcelona, Valencia, Tarragona and Algeciras. , where works are already being carried out to create corridors and hubs that will be key to its competitiveness.
Without going any further, Barcelona, with a traffic of 59 million tons registered until November, has recently established with Adif the state commercial company Train Port Barcelona, which will develop and manage the large railway logistics node made up of six terminals, budgeted at 800 million of euros and that will provide service to the port of Barcelona and its surroundings. One of the main objectives of this great project is to go from the current 16% that rail freight transport represents in the Barcelona port to the future 30% or 40%.
“We ports have the commitment and obligation to promote the transport of goods by rail to improve the efficiency of the logistics chain with a double objective: to reduce CO2 emissions and to be more competitive,” says the president of the Port Authority of Tarragona, Saül Garreta. The entity he directs is investing more than 22 million euros in the second phase of construction of what is known in the sector as a “dry port”: the Guadalajara-Marchamalo terminal, strategically located in the Henares corridor and in the area of influence of Madrid, with signs of becoming one of the main hubs of the center of the peninsula.
An intermodal terminal in dry dock that will have its twin in La Boella, in the interior of Tarragona and a short distance from Reus airport. There the port is investing another 25 million euros in the expansion and adaptation of this intermodal station, key for the development of the port of Tarragona, with the capacity to operate up to eight incoming and eight outgoing trains each day of up to 750 meters in length. .
The much-claimed Mediterranean corridor is one of the key arteries for the development of Spanish ports facing the Mediterranean, but it is not the only one. For Valencia, for example, the corridor is vital, but so is its connection with central Spain.
In this sense, the port of València ended 2023 finally receiving the green light from the Council of Ministers for the expansion project of the northern area, which, with an investment of 1,600 million euros, mainly foresees the construction of a new terminal containers and an adjacent six-track railway terminal that will be the largest in Spain. An announcement that has simultaneously reactivated the so-called railway highway between said future large terminal inside the port of Valencia and the Madrid-Abroñigal station, an exclusive railway logistics terminal for goods, located one kilometer south of the Atocha station. There is already a first project in this line that is scheduled to start in May of this year.
“The railway is being a key piece in our movement structure,” says Aurelio Martínez, president of the Port Authority of Valencia, who places the flow of weekly trains in the Valencian port at 99, although 93% of the containers that They enter or leave in trucks. Hence, the president insists that “our objective is to continue increasing this traffic quota, betting on the train, long-distance lines, charging points, support for railway connections and the improvement of the infrastructure of our network. inside".
In Algeciras, whose port is the southern gateway to Europe for commercial traffic from Africa and America, two thirds of the project to modernize the Algeciras-Bobadilla corridor, another of the railway highways that connect with a dry port in Zaragoza, have already been carried out. . The action, valued at almost 473 million, involves modernizing and electrifying the 174 kilometers of this road, but also its adaptation to mixed gauge to be able to connect container traffic with the European Atlantic and Mediterranean corridors. Another key highway for the effective deployment of the Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T).
