The quadrupling of tracks between Castelldefels and El Prat has taken a step back. The Official State Gazette published on March 25 the dismissal of the award to draft the basic and construction projects for platforms of an action called to improve railway capacity in the southern corridor of the Barcelona area.
The decision returns the project to the initial processing phase of an investment linked to the southern Regionals. The action had been put out to tender in July 2024, but the change in criteria by Adif and the Ministry of Transport once again extends deadlines that already pointed beyond 2030 for the start of the work.
Return to the starting point
The Rodalies Plan had already anticipated weeks before that the budget to start this infrastructure would go beyond that date. Now, with the formal dismissal of the award, the calendar is extended even further and reopens the technical and administrative debate on how the expansion should be processed.
Until now, Adif maintained that the new double track next to the existing infrastructure did not require an informative study or an environmental impact assessment, understanding that it was not a new work, but an expansion on already reserved land. With the suspension, for the moment, the criterion of those who defended that this informative study should indeed be carried out is imposed.
That informative study is in the bidding phase since early January, a move that reinforces the turn in the processing and delays an action considered strategic to separate circulations and relieve one of the sections with the most railway traffic in the country.
A key work for Regionals and Rodalies
Adif had publicly defended that this intervention should double the capacity of the network in the section with the highest traffic density of the southern railway corridor in the Barcelona area, between the Catalan capital and Sant Vicenç de Calders via the coastal route. It also maintained that the quadrupling would provide greater flexibility in traffic management to separate the Regionals and Rodalies services.
The railway manager's forecast was that the work would also allow increasing speeds and reducing travel times on Regional services and on the semi-direct services of line R2 bound for Sant Vicenç de Calders. The Association for the Promotion of Public Transport estimates that the reduction in the journey could be between 5 and 7 minutes for the Regionals.
Criticisms of user platforms
The president of the PTP, Adrià Ramírez, considers that the administrative slowdown will have a direct cost on the calendar.
"In the end, we will have lost four or five years, so that, at the very earliest, we will be in 2032 for the start of the works" - Adrià Ramírez, president of the PTP
Ramírez maintains that it is one of the most relevant actions to improve the Rodalies Catalunya network and demands institutional involvement to unblock the file.
"The Generalitat to put it on the table and pressure the ministry" - Adrià Ramírez, president of the PTP
Also has expressed his discomfort for the new delay.
"In the end, you don't know if it's incompetence or bad faith, that is, if it's blocked by a bureaucratic issue or there's a real will" - Adrià Ramírez, president of the PTP
From Dignitat a les Vies, its spokesperson, Ana Gómez Llauradó, has advanced that the quadrupling between Castelldefels and El Prat will be one of the issues that the user platforms will convey on April 15 in Madrid to the Minister of Transport, Óscar Puente.
"We are talking about a work that does not have a very high cost, relatively easy to do in terms of its execution and with a very high impact, which confirms to us that users are not prioritized and that in the south we always remain at the end of the line" - Ana Gómez Llauradó, spokesperson for Dignitat a les Vies
The dismissal of the award moves away an infrastructure called to organize railway traffic between El Prat and Castelldefels and again leaves up in the air an action that, on paper, should directly benefit travelers from the metropolitan south and the Regionals along the coast.