First there were the tracks along which the Rodalies trains have been running underground for some time, then the large structure of the macro-station that will one day have a bright lobby under an ornate pergola and now it is the turn of the upper floor, where high-speed trains will pass. The works of La Sagrera, after too many years idling or directly paralyzed, advance at a constant and clearly visible pace.
The enormous cranes that help to build the slab of the roof of the future station these days already allow one to get an idea of the gigantic magnitude of the project and to firmly believe that one day La Sagrera will be a reality. For now, the works have reached 70% completion of the whole structure and accesses, according to the railway infrastructure administrator (Adif). The lower level is finished and now the central hall and the upper level remain. Technically, the works have entered the last phase.
The great 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 La Sagrera. It is expected that it will be at the end of 2024, if nothing goes wrong, when the roof is finished and the first AVE route is already 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 similar in any station in Spain", highlights Alberto Alcañiz, the person in charge 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 Sants station, which has clearly become too small since the entry of various operators into the Madrid-Barcelona corridor after the liberalization of the railway sector.
The second high-speed track will be put into service a year later, at the end of 2025, or beginning of 2026 at the latest. At that time, the tracks of the external route will disappear, as previously happened with the Rodalies lines, first the Mataró line and then the Granollers line. 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 run on a single track between the Catalan capital and Mollet del Vallès, as they have been doing since the beginning of the year without major problems, although if one day a technical incident occurs in the infrastructure, the service will have no choice but to be completely interrupted.
The final transfer of the AVE tracks to the interior of La Sagrera, within two and a half years, will be accompanied by the final 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 considered completed. From then on, all trains will circulate inside, although without stopping.
Sants station will notice this in an important way because the logistical tasks can be transferred in their entirety to La Sagrera, although passengers will still not be able to get on and off here, as is already the case with travelers on Rodalies lines R1 and R2 , that if they hang on to the windows of the train they see the interior of the terminal, even without escalators or the basic elements that give a station its name.
For that, it will still be necessary to award the construction works of the architectural part as such, making the project of the Fermín Vázquez studio a reality, in which the famous architect and his team have been working for two years. Said scenario does not yet have an end date, perhaps around the end of the decade, but no person in charge of Adif dares to formalize it in public after so many unfulfilled calendars since the beginning, 13 years ago.
In this indeterminate future, the enormous linear park planned on the station roof must also become a reality, covering what for many years was an urban scar with a green space equivalent to five blocks from the Eixample. Through it you will access the pergola and the singular entrance planned to the railway space, with a huge hall from where you can go down to the lower area to use Rodalies and go up to the upper one for high-speed trains. For Alcañiz, this point is the one with the “greatest complexity” in the final phase of the works that are now underway.
As imagining all this finished still requires some imaginative effort, Adif is applying augmented reality for the first time in the Sagrera works. Those responsible for the project combine it with BIM (Building Information Modeling) technology, which allows each and every detail of the work to be put into a computer system and coordinate all the companies involved, a fundamental issue in a project with so many contracts. moving in parallel. The centralization of all work plans in the same document accessible in the cloud is probably one of the most important advances in recent years, even if it is inconspicuous, and has revolutionized the construction sector and other similar ones such as the preparation of meeting rooms. Barcelona Fair.
In the case of La 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 tracks and all the infrastructure finished. In this way, they can anticipate possible errors or setbacks that are not easy to detect among so much work.
