In Spain, Renfe orders trains too big to pass through tunnels

We would laugh if the case did not cause a considerable delay in delivery. Renfe, Spain’s national railway company, has ordered 31 trains to renew its fleet in the north of the country. The problem is that it ordered oversized trains for the tunnels of its lines.

It must be said that the network is a bit special, argued the Secretary General for Infrastructure at the Ministry of Transport, Xavier Flores, to explain the blunder. Renfe inherited the management of this network operated until 2012 by Feve (Ferrocarriles de vía estrecha, in French narrow-gauge railways), i.e. more than a thousand kilometers through Galicia, Asturias, Cantabria, Castile and Leon and Murcia. The company notably operated a train called El Transcantábrico, a “hotel on rails” which allows you to discover the Cantabrian coast in an original way.

“April Fools !”

The president of Cantabria is furious. “It looks like an April Fool’s joke”, exclaimed Miguel Ángel Revilla on February 3 on the television channel La Sexta. He did not mince his words: “Someone messed up here in an outrageous way. It’s inexplicable and inadmissible!” he storms.

Adif, the Spanish public body in charge of managing the rail network, has sacked the head of track inspection and technology and Renfe has done the same with the current head of material management. But Miguel Ángel Revilla believes that this is far from enough to close the file. “If the case hadn’t come out in the media, they would have been able to say nothing! It’s so shameful! We demand that the Minister find a solution as soon as possible. We are not going to touch the tunnels, they are as they are. Let them make a train that goes through the tunnels!”

In all, around thirty new trains were to connect Asturias to Cantabria, which has been waiting for them for three years. A contract has a million dollars, all the same. No train has yet been manufactured and Madrid will lend to the constructor, the CAF company, a copy of the train currently in circulation, so that he can take the measurements himself.