Spain at two speeds

SANTOS NUÑEZ DEL CAMPO *
CCOO Union Communication and Transport Federation Sectorial Politics Responsible

After some decades of languishing time for the train in which it seemed that the Spanish railway would run the risk of disappearing, the society turn its eyes again to the train. The prestige reaches by the Commuter services and AVE line, the next conclusion of the main roads plan, the environment depletion because of a transport system based on the private vehicles, the increasement of the railway companies efficiency with reasonable prices, have provoked that the railway is the new social and political point of attraction.

In this way the initiatives to endow the routes with XXI century designs with high performance qualities are multiplied and new railway lines are planned.

Unfortunately, the main risk is to waste in a racional way this favorable moment for the railway, and we think it seems that neither the State Administration nor the Autonomous Regions ones rise to the occasion.

The risk is to minimize the importance of a national debate about a strategic aspect (the structuring role of the new railway), transforming it in a collection of little mirrors and glass beads (high velocity, rail wide, european modernity) that are showed for the next electoral campaign. The risk is to transform something that would be a State subject in a mixture of "bell tower politics".

In front of a social demand consolidated in favour of the railway, the present offer from the administrations is a incoherent and insufficient railway politic, based on the comparative wrong between the regions, where there are many promises and a few obligations, where it seems that the technical, economic and social rationality has been losen.

Because of that, in spite of this social and politic favorable climate, there is a notable dispersion of the initiatives, that do not have at the present neither with a serious economical evalutation nor with a political definition of the priorities in the State level. It is showed in the little bufget obligation and in the calling to move the private financing, but without a role definition .

For example, the estimate cost of the necesary substructures for the development of the numerous High Velocity proposals that have proliferated (without a control by the Substructure Ministry) reaches 3,5 billions of pesetas, a quantity that is twenty times over the year budget of the Ministry for the investiment in new railway substructure.

In the institutional speech, where is the discussion about the transport politics?. Where is the discussion about its substructures, where is the Substructures Manager Plan?. Where is the sectorial discussion, the railway politic?. And when we are reach this debate that would must be a State one, what is the role for the High Velocity, for a conventional railway with high performance qualities?, is it really a insuperable problem the differences in the rail wide?, is it not the goods transport the pending subject of the train?, and a large etc.

CCOO defends a transport politic closer than the european coordinates, where the railway has a market quote twice over the Spanish one in number of passengers and four times over the goods transport. CCOO denounces that the conventional railway situation and the lack of suitable material are the limits imposed by the administrations in the Spanish railway development. CCOO wants to inform that the spanish railway workers have the highest productivity rates in Europe, and with suitable means they are able to do quality services with reasonable costs, as it has happened with the Commuter development, that is a world reference at the present.

CC.OO. bets on a high performance qualities railway to passengers and goods, on a integrating railway. The discussion High Velocity/Big Velocity is a false and boorish one, because in all Europe both concepts are not confronted, but are complementary ones and responds to a global view and neither to the confrontation between the communities in the electoral time nor to the despotic whims that some time ago marked the Spanish railway development in the XIX century.

CCOO denunds too that the extension of the UIC rail wide (or international one, or european one as it is named) has not been thought too mucha and it cans generate a railway with two velocities for two Spains.

The risk is to consolidate a little network-High Velocity network and UIC wide of 5.000 kilometers for the Mediterranean zone and a conventional network in a degradation process, far from the other, in the North of the Sevilla-Madrid-Barcelona zone, transforming it in a progressive way in a FEVE (narrow rail railway) of big rail condemned to languish.

Because of that, for CCOO the urgent building of the Madrid-Valladolid north Variant in RENFE wide, as structuring and balancing element of the railway in the north and north-west of the country is strategical. It is necesary to clear up that the Renfe rail wide (or iberian, because it is shared with Portugal) permits high and very high velocities perfectly, with a bigger grade of security because of its bigger expanse. If at the present it does not permits it is because of the lamentable situation of the biggest part of the conventional network and because of the lack of suitable material.

This model in consolidation, as much exotic and as less european, is the railway model that has prevailed in Japan, with a superimposed network and disconnected of the historic narrow rail network. The european different fact is not in relation with a technical parameter (rail wide), but it is in relation with the idea of social and territorial cohesion, with the idea of social and economical efficiency, and it is only supplied by a coherent politic as the one that is demanded by CCOO.

This politic demands, from our point of view, to limit the extension of the UIC rail wide in the Sevilla-Madrid-Barcelona-French Frontier high velocity for passengers zone as the most little evil, and perhanps to study the possibility of bringing nearer the railway frontiers to Barcelona and Bilbao from its present situation in Port-Bou and Irún, to surpass the technical problems in the present frontier terminals and to direct the goods traffic of its ports to the north of Europe. To improve the extension of the internal railway frontiers is a mistake that seems according with the worst enemy of the railway.

Assured this premises it would be possible to design a railway transport network where the quality (specially the one in relation with the time of the travel and not with the highest velocity because it do not means anything) is the main parameter to reach the political objectives explained before, where the High Velocity, Big Velocity and the other minor velocities form a integrate conglomeration that pérmits with reasonable costes to improve the presence of the railway and to present an economical, social and territorial beneficial balance to all the country.

* Santos Núñez del Campo is engineer and Sectorial Politics responsable of
CCOO Communication and Transport Federation.