Voted Best
ISSUE NO. 1753
7 - 13 February 2019
Newspaper in Spain 2017 & 2018
COSTA DE ALMERÍA YOUR PAPER, YOUR VOICE, YOUR OPINION
HIGH-SPEED: Passenger trains will travel between 200 and 300km/h.
Rail link moving forward THE long-awaited Murcia to Almeria AVE high-speed rail link is a few steps closer to becoming a reality with the news works look set to start on the Pulpi-Vera and the River Andarax-El Puche line sections. The ADIF railway infrastructure administrator announced its High-Speed Administration Council has now awarded the works contracts, which have a combined budget of just short of €154 million. Of this, nearly €147 million corresponds to the 25.7-kilometre stretch of line which will go through Pulpi, Cuevas del Almanzora and Vera municipalities. The works will include land movements, drainage and repositioning electrical and telephone services. Also planned are the construction of 10 viaducts, a pedestrian footbridge, raised crossings over roads, five walls and six tunnels. There will be one track from the starting point as far as the Vera-Almanzora passenger station, and a double track as far as the end of the route. Once up and running, passenger trains on the line will be able to travel at speeds of between 200 and 300km/h, and freight
trains at a minimum speed of 100km/h. The 30-month contract has gone to the Union Temporal de Empresas (UT), which is formed by Acciona Construccion and Ferrovial Agroman, the works scheduled for completion at the end of 2021. The announcement the ADIF High-speed Administration Council had allocated the €7.2 million contract to construct the 1.6-kilometre River Andarax-El Puche stretch of the line to the company Comsa, came just a few days after ADIF formally became the owner of 35 plots of land in Almeria City, Huercal de Almeria and Viator, which are needed for the works. The infrastructure project is expected to take 10 months to complete and will extend up to the beginning of the works to run the rail line underground in the El
Puche area of Almeria City. The contract includes repositioning 1.8 kilometres of track on the conventional Linares-Almeria line, and will be co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund. The Almeria Mesa del Ferrocarril, a platform for a number of organisations and institutions pushing for improvements to the province’s rail infrastructure, described the announcements on the AVE works contracts as ‘good news,’ but added, ‘especially taking into account that now for more than seven years
Almeria Province has had the high-speed works paralysed.’ The platform was critical; it had taken four months between receiving companies’ bids and eventually choosing the one to take on the works. It also pointed out there would now have to be a period of time for the process of land expropriations for the PulpiVera section of line before works could start, and that there are other stretches of the Almeria-Murcia line for which works contracts have yet to be awarded. The government prediction for completion of the link is 2023.
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