Around 20% of the goods that move between Valencia and Madrid already travel by train, a figure much higher than the 4% that do so on average in the Spanish transport system, according to data provided by the Railway Infrastructure Administrator (ADIF). ).
This is allowed by the use of the not very busy line that circulates between both cities via Albacete; since the AVE does it via Cuenca. But this old infrastructure that allows goods to avoid coincidence with the ever-increasing passenger traffic between both points will have to be adapted to face the challenge posed by the future Valencian dock.
As Minister Óscar Puente announced yesterday, maximizing the use of rail transport is an essential condition to not only avoid the increase in road traffic that would otherwise be inevitably accompanied by the expansion of the port of Valencia, but even reduce its volume. current.
As is well known, that is the main purpose of the Mediterranean Corridor, whose implementation will allow the axis that unites national producers - and international producers that use the ports of the Spanish Mediterranean - with the heart of Europe not to depend as it does today of intense and polluting road traffic. But it also demands the improvement of the railway axis that starts from the capital of Spain.
It is about launching a railway "highway" between the large internal terminal - the largest in Spain - planned for the port of Valencia and the Madrid-Abroñigal station, an exclusive railway logistics terminal for goods, located one kilometer to the south of Atocha station, next to the M-30.
There is already a first project on that line that is scheduled to begin in May 2024, when the trains in which the Tramesa company, allied with the Italian group Transitalia, will be put into circulation, plan to upload up to 18,000 trucks per year in convoys that will take them out. of the highway between Valencia and Madrid.
Expanding this traffic requires, on the one hand, involving more private companies and accompanying this growth with the public investments necessary for the logistics network to adapt to a large increase in volume compared to the current one.
For now, the central Government will approve in the Council of Ministers next Tuesday the tender for the works of the container terminal of the northern expansion of the Port of Valencia, with a public investment of 656 million euros and a global investment of more than 1.6 billion euros. It will be at least five years, if there are no judicial setbacks along the way, until the new terminal is commissioned.
In his speech yesterday, aware of the environmental reluctance that part of Valencian society and political groups have regarding the project, Minister Óscar Puente precisely played the railway card, by ensuring that the plan seeks to "derive container traffic to the train " because it contemplates "the largest railway terminal that any port on the peninsula and probably none in Europe will have", at a time when 93% of the containers that enter and leave the facilities do so in trucks.
As an example of the important link between the Valencian dock and Madrid, last October 75% of the containers that were loaded in the Port of Valencia had their origin in the capital of Spain and 77% of those that were unloaded had Madrid as destination.
