The Generalitat, through the Catalan Consumer Agency of the Ministry of Business and Labour, proposed this Tuesday to sanction Renfe with 700,000 euros for incidents in the Rodalies service during the month of May, it reported in a statement. In May, Consum opened a disciplinary file against the railway operator for alleged "very serious" infractions in the management of the breakdown that affected the circulation of R2 Sud trains between Barcelona and Sant Vicenç de Calders (Tarragona) for three weeks.
After carrying out various inspections, it attributed to the company "unfair commercial practices and lack of attention to users" with fines that could range from 100,001 to one million euros, in accordance with the sanctioning regime of the Consumer Code.
Consum considered the "distrust" that the events caused in consumers and the prevalent position of Renfe as the dominant operator in the sector to be aggravating facts.
It also detected "deficiencies" in information to users in relation to changes in service, schedules and alternative transport, such as closed customer service points and trains advertised as direct or with stops at some stations that, in practice, stopped at all.
According to the Generalitat, the Consum file is based on "the limited framework of action that the railway sector has", focused mainly on aspects of attention and information to consumers. Likewise, the organization maintains two more files open, still in process, for the "deficiencies detected" at the Camp de Tarragona, Reus and l'Aldea-Amposta-Tortosa (Tarragona) stations in May.
On May 1, the catenary on track 3 of the Gavà station (Barcelona) broke around 9:00 p.m.: the cable fell on a security system signal and caused the entire enclave to burn and the auxiliary systems to be damaged. .
The incident forced the use of telephone blocking and the reduction of train passage: first, with two convoys per hour per direction; since May 5, with three per hour and direction. It took Adif three weeks to solve the incident, and on May 22 the usual service was resumed.
The final report on the fire -- which was released in September -- stated that the absence of a fork on a faucet and vandalization of the ground system that protects the facility caused the incident.
