After months of paralysis and uncertainty, the Ministry of Transportation has reactivated the process to give entry to new railway companies on several routes that link Madrid with destinations in the north and south of Spain and that until now Renfe continues to operate as a monopoly. It does so just a few days after the railway operators demanded a detailed calendar to know the deadlines and requirements to participate in the so-called ‘second liberalization’ of the high-speed network.
As revealed The Countrythe Government plans to open to competition the routes that link Madrid with Galicia, Asturias, Cantabria and, at least, two new Andalusian cities: Cádiz and Huelva. With this, the public operator Renfe, under the Transport umbrella, will no longer be the only one that provides service in up to 10 provinces where today it is the only option: A Coruña, Pontevedra, Ourense, Zamora, Palencia, León, Asturias, Cantabria, Cadiz and Huelva.
As this media points out, the process will be similar to that of the first phase and interested companies must attend a capacity contest where they offer their technical and operational capabilities. After its analysis, the network manager, Adif, will endorse with each of them a framework agreement that will grant them certain paths for a long period, which in the case of the first phase was 10 years. With this, they will be able to put trains to new destinations such as Santiago de Compostela, Vigo, Oviedo, Gijón or Santander.
Need to buy trains
But until that point is reached, interested companies They will have to buy new trainssince all these sections of the network have a different gauge, the Iberian gauge present throughout the conventional network, compared to the standard gauge that is only present in the trunk axes of the high-speed network.
This is precisely one of the factors that is already dissipating the interest of new operators, since the technology that allows overcoming this physical barrier is almost exclusive to Talgo. The Spanish manufacturer, immersed in a controversial process of shareholder change, has its factories full and does not have the capacity to expand its production, a problem that is already affecting Renfe itself, which is late receiving orders for new high-speed trains. speed of the 106 and 107 series.
Also the Basque CAF or the china CRRC They have systems capable of overcoming the different track gauge, but the Spanish company has not implemented it in very high-speed trains (it is only available for trains of up to 250 kilometers per hour) and the Asian company has not yet managed to place its trains in the European market. These factors seem to extend the deadlines so that future operators can start their operations up to a horizon close to the year 2030given the industry’s long train delivery times.
Alsa and Ouigo, interested
At the moment, the companies that have formalized their interest in this process are Renfewhich will try to retain its market share; and the consortium formed by the bus company Bus and the Andalusian company Eco Railowned by the Magtel group and directed by the former president of Renfe, Julio Gómez Pomar. This company already had in its roadmap to bid for routes to Galicia, Asturias and western Andalusia, to which it could now add Cantabria, a region where Alsa already has a large presence of buses.
Ouigoa subsidiary of the French state operator SNCF, confirmed last Thursday, in a forum organized by elEconomista.es, who are seeking funding to participate in this phasealthough to do so he claimed to “clear many doubts” about the process. That same uncertainty was shown by the CEO of IryoSimone Gorini, whose company is already the second in terms of number of passengers and frequencies and is owned by Trenitalia, Globalvía and Air Nostrum.
Adif, which has already launched a prior consultation with operators to test the pulse of the sector, would have planned to publish the conditions of the process, the deadlines and the paths available on the different lines during the first quarter of 2025according to the aforementioned medium. From then on, the analysis of the offers of each of the interested parties will begin, with the idea that the award will take place at the end of 2026.
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