The decision by Spain’s Ministry of Transport to drop an electrified double-track option for the Teruel–Sagunto section of the Cantabrian–Mediterranean Corridor has prompted anger from Aragon’s regional government. It said the move would create a bottleneck on the route to the Port of Valencia and called it a “historic error”.
Spain has formally advanced plans to leave the Teruel–Sagunto section as a single conventional Iberian-gauge railway, opening the information study to public consultation after rejecting calls for the route to be electrified and double-tracked.
The section forms the southern part of the Zaragoza–Teruel–Sagunto axis, giving landlocked Aragon access to the Mediterranean and the Port of Valencia. It links the Zaragoza-PLAZA and Platea logistics hubs, in Zaragoza and Teruel respectively, with the Valencia port area.
Zaragoza is one of the Iberian Peninsula’s main logistics hubs, located at the intersection of routes towards the Cantabrian coast, the Atlantic, Madrid, the Mediterranean and the French border. Retaining a single track south of Teruel would therefore constrain freight capacity between Aragon and the Valencian ports.
The ministry, however, said the double-track option could not be justified by forecast demand and would require investment of more than €3.7 billion, according to Valencia Plaza. Aragon has said it will submit objections to the decision, describing it as a “historic error” and a “lack of ambition and commitment”.
The regional government is demanding that the section instead be developed as an electrified, double-track, high-performance railway. It noted that the route had already been conceived as a high-performance section in 2004. The rest of the Cantabrian–Mediterranean Corridor is planned as an electrified double-track route.
‘Unjustified bottleneck’
“The section is the connection of the entire corridor to Spain’s main port for freight traffic, Valencia,” said David Sánchez Fraile, Aragon’s director general of transport, as Valencia Plaza reported. He warned that retaining a single track “creates an unjustified bottleneck on a strategic rail axis” for national and international transport.
“Without a double-track electrified line, this corridor will not be a competitive alternative for freight and passenger transport,” he added.
