transport

After more than 10 years of negotiations between the Catalan government and the Spanish Ministry for Transport and many changes on the route, the railway connection to Barcelona’s port will be a reality in two years’ time. The final project will cost €104 million and will be 50% funded by Port de Barcelona and the Spanish Ministry for Transport. The railway connection to Barcelona’s Port has been long-awaited by the Catalan government, as 13% of the containers and 30% of the cars that pass through the port are transported by train. The acceleration of this connection emphasises the need to start the construction of the Mediterranean corridor, one of the government’s main goals in terms of infrastructure, which is set to transport freight and passengers non-stop from Gibraltar to Central Europe.

The short-distance train network has been interrupted this morning in the centre of Barcelona due to a fire in an abandoned station in the centre of the Catalan capital. Although the fire was extinguished by 7 am CET this Tuesday, the smoke continued to spread throughout the city’s train tunnels for hours, affecting six stations, more than 210 trains, metro line 1 and nearly 100,000 passengers, according to the Catalan Government. An accumulation of waste in the abandoned station is most likely to have been the cause of the fire. Today’s chaos is to be added to a long list of problems which have occurred on the network during the last decade, mainly due to a lack of investment in infrastructure by the Spanish Government.

The 17^th edition of the annual International Logistics and Material Handling Exhibition (SIL) kicked off on Tuesday in Barcelona and will be on until Thursday 11^th June. Held at Fira de Barcelona's Montjuic venue, the show will host more than 550 companies (45% international) presenting about a hundred innovations for the first time. The event is the only one of its kind taking place in Spain and the second-biggest in Europe. During the opening ceremony, SIL's President, Enrique Lacalle, pointed out that the logistics sector had not been severely hit by the crisis and now "is giving good news" with a4% rise in corporate turnover expected for 2015. In addition, the nature of the exhibition reflects the character of the hosting city: the Catalan capital's port has the largest logistics concentration of southern Europe and the Mediterranean within a radius of 5 Km and also has a geostrategic location. Finally, the main roads and railway connecting the Iberian Peninsula with the rest of Europe pass through Greater Barcelona.

Some roads have been blocked for a few hours and thousands of children had their schools shut down for the day. These have been the main effects of a small snowstorm that covered most of Catalonia during Wednesday morning. Catalonia has a wide diversity of landscapes, combining alpine mountains with river deltas, flat agricultural plains with rocky coasts, hills covered by forests with sandy beaches. This diversity is concentrated in an area the size of Belgium, which results in a wide diversity of climates. In the Pyrenees, snow is present for most of the winter, but this is not the case for the rest of Catalonia. In the flatlands around Lleida or in hilly areas of Girona or the northern part of Barcelona Province, it tends to snow at least once per year, but not in the rest of the country, where it only snows once every 4 or 5 years. Therefore, when snow arrives, transport problems and other issues tend to be also present.

Abertis, the international group which manages transport and telecommunications infrastructures, has announced it will list its telecom exchange business on the Stock Exchange in 2015. The Catalan company presented its new Strategic Plan for 2015-2017 to investors in London this week. The main objectives of the decision were to develop its business strategy, increase returns for shareholders and boost growth. The company currently owns 8,000 radio, television and mobile signal towers. Besides, Abertis presented its numbers for the first nine months of 2014 to the Spanish Stock Exchange Authority (CNMV), including a net profit of €560 million, an increase of 4.6%. The new Strategic Plan also envisages a dividend increase of 10% for its shareholders every year until 2017.  

German chemical multinational BASF does not expect to launch its intermodal merchant station in Tarragona's petro-chemical compound until early 2017, two years after it initially forecast. The date of commissioning, as recognised by the company, is conditioned by the start of construction of the third rail connecting the railway line in Tarragona to the Mediterranean Railway Corridor (a strategic transport priority for the European Union), an infrastructure the Spanish Government keeps delaying. Although there is currently no start date for construction, BASF has set up the company ‘Combiterminal Catalonia SL’: a 'joint venture' with Contank SA, Hoyer España SA, and Schmidt Holding GmbH and Tradillo Inversiones SL (Pañalón Group) collaborating to build and operate the station.

Poor road conditions and a high rate of traffic accidents have led the Catalan Government to approve a strict circulation restriction for four axle lorries throughout 90 kilometers (56 miles) of the N-II, a road linking Madrid with Barcelona and the French border, which has only one lane per direction. Although the measure is of temporary character, it has outraged roadside shopkeepers and lorry drivers, but neighbors from towns close to the highly-frequented road totally support it. According to the Catalan Ministry for Public Works, now is the moment for the widening project of the road drawn up by the Spanish Government in 1995 to be restarted after years of delay due to a lack of funding in order to improve road conditions for the main entrance road to Spain from France.

During the last few winters, snow and ice have paralysed Central Europe for days and sometimes weeks. Lorries from all over Europe transport up to 60,000 tons of salt a month from Súria (Bages County) to spread on roads throughout the continent. The mines have tripled production in the last 2 years and are the largest of Southern Europe.

The highway management company Acesa has already begun construction works on highway rest stops in Montseny and next to Barcelona. The new services for lorries and their drivers will have a fee of 10 to 20 euros. They include 24h surveillance, showers, laundry, resting facilities and entertainment zones.

This summer, cameras and patrolling guards will be emplaced in rest areas of the Barcelona metropolitan region?s highways to prevent robberies.

The high speed and capacity railway connection for freight and passengers connecting Spain with France will run along the Mediterranean shore. The option of going via Zaragoza through the middle of the Pyrenees clashes with the economic crisis.