Two intermediate positions, one from Renfe and the other from Adif, have been blamed first in the Feve trains scandal, which entered service in 2020 and will take two to three years to reach Asturias and Cantabria due to an error in measurements. your tunnels. The Ministry of Transport (Mitma) is trying to solve what the Head of the Principality wants. Adrian Barbonand leaders of opposition parties and representatives of user associations described it as “incompetent”. Those who were laid off Head of Adif Inspection and Road Technology and the person holding the position Material Management Area Manager at Renfe Viajeros In June 2020, when the production of the trains was tendered and he was currently in charge of materials management of the Technical and Operations Department of Renfe Viajeros.
Minister Raquel Sánchez is waiting for the result of the inspection that she had made to determine whether others were responsible for the debacle of the trains, which had not yet started to be manufactured when the error was detected, but whose measures were taken. He had failed to establish safety distances in the various existing tunnels on the Feve line in Asturias, Galicia and Cantabria.
Both Adif and Renfe track down a paragraph in the press releases they sent out this Monday announcing the layoffs. “They will cooperate with absolute transparency in the Mitma audit and evaluate the results to proceed with the proposed final organizational adjustments.” Translation: there will be more layoffs.
Raquel Sánchez had warned about this for only a few hours. In Valencia, the minister stressed that none of the convoys commissioned three years ago had yet been produced, as the winning bidder CAF was “in the design and definition phase of how trains should be”, and in the process they “warned” that they would be done with what is defined in the specification clauses. “We now expect with CAF to decide what these trains should look like in the coming months and start producing them from there,” he added.
He insisted that “no euro was spent on the production of these trains”He explained that there was “an error, a coincidence, in the designs specified in the specifications and in the design that trains should ultimately have.” And write that this is the design that needs to be defined in the coming months.”
compensate the area
Just hours before their dismissal, the head of the Principality, Adrian Barboninsisted they had to “roll heads”. He took advantage of the situation to demand “more trains” and “a bigger investment” as “compensation” for the delay of trains. Referring to him and Cantabria president Miguel Ángel Revilla, “Of course we have more trains, the opposite leads us to chain ourselves to the Ministry.”
The Administrative President of Asturias believes the Minister, who confirmed that the trains were not produced when the error in the measurements was detected. But he added that the ministry has a “significant reliability issue” and should “turn their heads” to fix it, even if it’s a fault of “techies who designed poorly or ignored the situation”. Our ridiculous-sounding tunnels.”
“Yes or yes, trains will be produced”, Barbón claimed, and should be “as soon as possible”. In any event, he conclusively stated that the Minister was “unaware of this problem and spoke to both Revilla and me as soon as he found out what was going on”. Barbón wanted to distinguish between the delays of the Pajares variant (thirteen years to date) and the delays of trains ordered for Feve.. “A delay of several months (from AVE to Asturias) due to some safety tests and lack of materials has nothing to do with another (that of the Feve trains), which sounds like crap to Pepe Gotera and Otilio, the car is already designed and finally “We’ll have to see how it looks. It’s not the same, it’s not comparable,” he said.
The reaction of Álvaro Queipo, PP’s general secretary in Asturias, to the “soap opera” on trains was to formally request an “urgent” call from the Alliance for Infrastructures so that the Barbón Government would explain the situation “first hand”. Create a “bitch” and a “common front” of the “feve” trains and agree on a “challenging position with bloody sanchismo rifts in Asturias”.
“We are facing numerous contempt from the Sánchez Government with Asturias. Planning trains that do not fit in tunnels would have sounded like a joke if it were not for the enormous damage done to Asturians who would have to wait several hours. There are still many years to modernized trains,” he said.
Sergio García, deputy for Citizens at the General Assembly, stated that “unfair competition between regions” is “not a way to justify any problem”. He stated that Asturias should get “the trains that Cantabria needs, whatever it needs, according to its needs”. The point, he says, is “it’s hard to know what those needs are because we don’t have a sustainable mobility strategy that has been on hold since 2018.” From there, he concluded, “To talk about this kind of issue is pure speculation and populism. Some parts of Asturias are in a critical state and have some connection to the nineteenth-century plateau, and we only witness unfortunate demonstrations, if not outright failed businesses.” . .
Adrián Pumares, the general secretary of the forum, demanded that “Asturias take over railway powers to improve service and avoid the incompetence perpetrated by the Spanish Government with trains that do not fit in tunnels”. He warned that the PSOE’s “roadmap” on rail issues is: “Using poor service, underinvestment, obsolete infrastructure and low demand as excuses to close rail lines.” He believes that the resolution of the suburban network’s problems “did not go through propaganda visits or apparent anger”, but “negotiation of the best possible transfer of railway powers to Asturias”.