"The studies of the Valencia knot and the Alicante knot, with the Torrellano variant, are the ones that have to focus our attention for the future," said Josep Vicent Boira, commissioner for the Government of the Mediterranean corridor, this week, after analyzing traveled it in the last four years. “Take a dynamic photo of the situation”, he also asked, who recognized that “we come from a period in which things did not advance”.
And although there are currently sections under construction or study, there are no longer blockages in the design, so the balance of the actions in the last four years is encouraging: it has gone from having only 40% planned to defining 100%, projects are already at 85%, works have gone from 45% to 74% and commissioning has gone from 21% to 34%. In total, there are 1,285 kilometers under construction and another 896 kilometers finished.
Now the focus must be placed, as Boira acknowledges, on Valencia and Alicante. In the Valencian Community, today, the kilometers under development add up to 488 and there are 229 already finished. One of the junctions on the Valencian route is the through tunnel, for which the Government presented the informative studies in October 2021, as well as those of the AVE from Valencia to Castelló.
There are a total of seven alternatives, with a different layout and budget estimate, which mostly run along the coast, but which also draw sections in the Valencian orchard, a thorny issue that will have to be seen how it is resolved. The lower cost alternative estimates the work at 1,440 million euros and would mean 22:05 minutes of time between the two Valencian cities.
After passing the public consultation, in which the allegations of the municipalities were collected, it is now time for the Ministry to issue the final report, since the next step is the preparation of the Environmental Impact Statement by the Ministry for the Transition Ecology and the Demographic Challenge.
In the presentation, the Ministry of Transport assured that this work was necessary due to the high density of traffic with great heterogeneity of traffic that limited the growth of the entire Mediterranean corridor. For this reason, for Josep V. Boira it is "extremely urgent" to speed it up, while the business sector has been claiming for some time that if the works are not speeded up, the Valencia tunnel threatens to be "the traffic light of Europe", as he has repeatedly explained. Vicente Boluda, president of the Valencian Association of Entrepreneurs.
On the other hand, there is the work on the railway access channel, whose agreement to finance the burying of the railway tracks that divide the southern neighborhoods of Valencia and the remodeling of the Joaquín Sorolla Station was signed this past summer. This Friday will be the economic opening of the offers, and the forecast is that the works will start in the first quarter of next year, after the delay caused by the appeal of the National Construction Confederation for the anti-fraud clauses of the work documents financed with European funds that, finally, Adif has modified.
In 2016, the Valencian Association of Entrepreneurs took a photo at La Encina station, which is already a “symbolic and epicenter of the claim” place for the QuieroCorredor platform. They returned there last year to denounce that the section is taking longer than technically it would have been "desirable and possible".
It is one of the key junctions, they assume from Adif, which hopes to accelerate its execution after transferring the traffic from Xàtiva-La Encina to a disused line for the Valencia-Alicante connection of the Mediterranean corridor. It was also the only part of the Mediterranean corridor in which no gauge change work had begun.
Once it is put into service, after an investment of 413 million euros, Adif will address the high-speed adaptation of the current Xàtiva-Nudo de la Encina railway line (45 km), in double track for the standard gauge connection of the three capitals of the Valencian Community. The total investment of this action is estimated at 187 million euros and, recently, Adif AV has already awarded the first two contracts for the execution of this project.
Today's meeting in Barcelona, which will be attended by more than a thousand businessmen and the presidents of Catalonia, the Valencian Community and Murcia summoned by AVE, will also be the second annual check-up of the current works of the corridor, in which the usual engineers of the movement
