The Minister of Transport, Oscar Puente, acknowledged this Thursday before the Congress of Deputies that the presence of Different widths in railway sections cause more incidents in the service. This situation particularly affects Galicia – which has a single track model compared to metric, Iberian and international gauges of the state network – and the socialist leader made explicit reference to the change station located in the municipality of Taboadela, in Orense, a “critical point” that last week recorded four incidents, three of which occurred on the Avril train, which caused service delays.
“Any small failure in the train derived from the movement itself becomes a critical failure and causes an interruption of the service,” Puente detailed on the Galician scene, in statements reported by Europa Press. This, he explained, is what happened in one of the recent incidents that occurred in Taboadela, arising from a problem in A screw affected by a stone embedded in the high-speed train during your trip.
According to the minister, there is also the “difficult” management of rail traffic between the different types of gauge on the national network. the existence of single-track sections and that a “significant part” of the network remains unelectrified, with very notable voltage differences that require specific materials to make circulation possible between all track variants.
Puente acknowledged that 48% of incidents that occur are linked to infrastructure, a figure that has increased this year but, “precisely”, he stressed, due to the work underway for its preparation and which is also compatible with the provision of the railway service.
Waiting up to three hours
BNG MP Nestor Rego responded to his intervention by criticizing him for the fact that one of the breakdowns “kept the road stopped for more than three hours, which would not have happened if there was a double track”, while calling for the modernisation of Galician infrastructure. On the other hand, the head of the Transport portfolio considered that the narrative of the nationalist position ignores “everything that has been done” in Galicia by the state government in terms of suburban trains, citing actions such as the construction of intermodal stations in Galician cities and the inclusion of the Vigo-Porto passenger section in the extended basic network of the EU map.
