Spain splashes £230m on trains too big for its own tunnels

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Spain’s government has been shamed after splashing millions on trains that don’t even fit through its tunnels. In June 2020, Spanish railway giant Renfe commissioned the manufacturing of 31 trains with dimensions that have now been discovered not to conform to the railway network on which they were going to circulate.

The vehicles were designed with a height that would prevent their passage through various tunnels on the Asturias and Cantabria commuter line.

This miscalculation is delaying the delivery of the new transport units for several years and has been branded an “unspeakable” embarrassment for the country.

When it was detected that, with the measures published in the network statement, the trains would not fit in certain sections of the infrastructure, the entire start-up manufacturing process was halted and the search for the best possible solution began, according to a report from Adif, Renfe and the State Railway Safety Agency.

Last week, the Spanish Government acknowledged the problem with the contract with CAF for the renewal of Renfe’s metric gauge fleet regarding “how the new trains that will run on the Feve lines in Cantabria and Asturias should be sized”.

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The General Secretary for Infrastructure, Xavier Flores , has explained to the media that the former Feve line is “very special”, with “smaller than usual” tunnels , which conditioned the size of the trains, whose manufacture was awarded by Renfe to CAF in 2020, after a bidding process started a year earlier.

He added: “If we followed the existing regulations, as in other lines, we could get these new trains, which we modernised by tender, to be smaller or not with the same conditions as the ones we currently have.”

Flores stressed that the Government has “a firm commitment” to the renewal of rolling stock for the Feve lines in both Cantabria and Asturias.

He added: “It is a commitment of 161 million euros for bidding for a contract.”

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Now the contractor has to completely renew the fleet in Cantabria and supply 10 new trains to that of Asturias, he stressed.

The president of the Principality, the socialist Adrián Barbón, has shown last Friday in Oviedo his “resounding discomfort” after the “unspeakable botch” that is going to cause a three-year delay in the delivery of 15 new trains to Asturias.

The Cantabrian president, Miguel Ángel Revilla, also declared after the news broke that he had had a meeting with Barbón, that “he is as outraged as I am and they have not given him a convincing explanation either”.

“Revilla said that I am trilling and it is true,” Barbón stated at a press conference when asked about this delay in the fleet committed to the region due to the problem with the new metric gauge trains for commuter and medium distance services between Cantabria and Asturias.

The whole project will cost Spanish taxpayers €258million (£230m).

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