The thick line of the new accesses to the port of Barcelona has been drawn for decades, but the initial drawing with a marker later requires work with a fine-tipped pencil that had not yet been done in the nearly thirty years that have passed since it was approved the Delta plan in 1994. In that macro-project that designed the expansion of the port and the airport of El Prat, made a reality some time ago, it also included the construction of a new highway and a railway axis at the entrance to the port of Barcelona through the old bed of the river Llobregat.
Although in these almost 30 years different proposals have been evaluated and one of them even laid the first stone – without going beyond that – the Ministry of Transport believes that it has found the best formula to accommodate the new road and rail accesses. and has given the green light to the basic project, to which La Vanguardia has had access and on which technicians from the numerous administrations involved have worked side by side for two and a half years: the ministry itself (especially the highway division), the railway infrastructure manager (Adif), State Ports, the port of Barcelona, Ferrocarrils de la Generalitat (FGC) and the Territory Department of the Generalitat.
All of them signed a collaboration protocol on October 7, 2020 and all of them have approved the final document, which is committed to unifying the road and rail entrance through the same point. "The accesses reach the port through a very limited space with the river on one side, ships on the other, electrical installations and gas pipelines below...", details the General Secretary for Infrastructures, Xavier Flores. The drafting team of the basic project has been forced to look for ingenious solutions and has ended up betting on making a sandwich with the FGC tracks in the entrance section to the port infrastructure itself, with the cars above and the freight trains that arrive from the Mediterranean corridor below.
At the most complicated point, the accesses will be boxed in with the Llobregat river on one side, the Zona Franca industries on the other, and the Rodalies and AVE tracks above, as can be seen in the infographic on the next page. In this way, everything will be brought in through the same place, with a viaduct for cars and trucks, just below – at ground level – the FGC track and below, underground, the two new rail access tracks with international gauge and Iberian. "It is not the usual solution, but the lack of space has forced us to look for this type of imaginative solution," says Flores. This is how an electrical substation is surrounded that in previous plans stood in the way of the accesses and whose transfer would have delayed between five and seven more years a work that is already late enough.
The construction project will go out to tender between September and October if the electoral cycle does not alter it and will involve another two years of technical work developing the initial idea embodied in the basic project, where it has been defined that the road accesses have about 10 kilometers in length total. They will start at the height of Sant Joan Despí as an extension of the A-2, which will also serve to improve the entrances and exits in a very congested area and will connect with the Llobregat junction in Sant Boi, another work long claimed, designed to the Olympic Games, left unfinished at the beginning of the century and which is expected to be reactivated this summer. At the height of Cornellà the new road will be separated on both sides of the A-2 and at the height of the Mercabarna bridge it will be unified on the railway accesses to enter the heart of the port through the three-level infrastructure (road, FGC and railway). Throughout the layout, both where there is plenty of space and where it is boxed in, the highway will have two lanes in each direction.
As for the railway accesses, the entire section will be double track with mixed gauge (standard and Iberian) designed exclusively for freight. On the one hand, it will connect with a single-track access branch to Can Tunis and, on the other, with a ring path in the expanded area of the port. In total, 3.4 kilometers of tracks, most of them covered and a few small sections between screens.
The global budget rises to 591 million euros, to which must be added 66.5 more corresponding to some expropriations that are necessary to pass the new roads through an industrial zone and 31 million more for the infrastructure inside the railway triangle. . In total, close to 700 million euros in about three years of works. If nothing is delayed, they should be a reality between 2028 and 2029.
The document that explains all this was expected for last summer, but the technical complexity has lengthened the deadlines much more than initially planned. With the intention of making up for lost time, the ministry has found a way to start some works, even if they are neither the highway nor the new train tracks themselves.
The plan is to start next year the works of the affected services. That is, all those deviations of cables, pipes and other issues that must be modified to accommodate the new infrastructure. It may seem minor, but in an environment as industrial and complex as this, with a large number of services affected, there is work for at least two years before starting to build the accesses to the port, the same time it will take to draw up the construction projects.
It is not the most common way to proceed, but Flores already tried it successfully in his previous stage, in the Generalitat, together with the current general director of Bimsa, Ricard Font. At that time, they decided to advance the work on the diversion of services affected by the construction of the tunnel for the extension of the L8 of Ferrocarrils. In this way they managed to move cables and pipes in Urgell street and Gran Via since January 2022 so that, when the tunnel construction works begin at the end of this summer, all that work will already be done.
In the case of the accesses to the port, we are talking, for example, of the construction of a passable gallery under Calle 40 of the Free Zone that will house gas pipelines, oil pipelines and high voltage lines. In that same street it will also be necessary to divert Agbar's water supply pipes, collectors of the Consorci of the Free Zone, lighting and underground telecommunications circuits. It will also be necessary to reposition the delivery pipe for water treated by the desalination plant of the supply entity Aigües Ter-Llobregat (ATL) right at the point where the river was diverted two decades ago to expand the port. In this section, the pipeline through which the water already treated in the desalination plant travels 12 kilometers upriver to the Fontsanta distribution station, in Sant Joan Despí, must be diverted a few meters for its contribution to the drinking water network.
These first works will involve an initial investment of around 15 million euros, to which more will come later, since the budgeted invoice for the replacement of affected services rises to a total of 77 million, including the replacement of the FGC track. , which must be reconstructed in the new scheme and will be compatible with a possible duplication if the Catalan public company wants to take advantage of it.
The signing of the financing agreement was expected for this summer, but the electoral call has forced it to be postponed until autumn. In the ministry they work with the idea of being able to sign it at the same time that the drafting of the construction projects is put out to public tender. By then, the administrations involved are expected to leave in writing how much money each one will invest. The provisional documents divide the economic contributions into three parts: about 270 million by Adif, 250 by the Ministry's General Directorate of Highways and another 200 by the port of Barcelona.
