Adif and Renfe minimize the accident in Spain

The railway infrastructure manager, Adif, explained today that the accident with the train in Santiago should not affect the Spanish bid to clinch the Brazilian HSR since the derailment was not “technically” produced in a high-speed section.

According to the specifications of the Brazilian National Land Transport Agency (ANTT) which EFE had access to, the bidding consortium should submit a document named “Modelo 15” (Model 15) in which it should be demonstrated that the train operating company “has not participated in the operation of any HSR (high-speed) system where a fatal accident would have occurred” for a period of 5 years.

The president of Adif, Gonzalo Ferre, has insisted that there would not be any requirement problem for the Spanish tender to the project – amounting to 13 billion Euros – although this point “is the least of our problems”.

In this same sense, the president of Renfe, Julio Gómez Pomar, made a declaration assuring today that the tragedy occurred in Santiago “is not an accident of the Spanish high-speed system”.

Pomar has insisted that what happened is “a terrible and deplorable” accident, but which “has not occurred in a high-speed track, has not happened in a high-speed train and which, therefore, is not applicable to what we would understand as a high-speed train accident”.

And, thus, he has said that this will be communicated to the Brazilian authorities, the country where a consortium entered into by Renfe and other Spanish companies applies for a contract to build a railway high-speed system.

“We shall meet with the consortium companies which will compete in Brazil to see what type of actions, with a communication and explanatory nature, we could adopt in order it becomes totally clear that this is not a Spanish high-speed accident”, he declared.

Following the Spanish achievement in the high-speed train which will connect the holy cities of Medina and Mecca, which is budgeted at 6.736 billion Euros, the Government seeks to repeat this triumph in Brazil at the reach of the public companies Renfe, Adif and Ineco and of the privately-held companies Bombardier, Elecnor, Cobra (ACS), Abengoa, Indra, Thales, Dimetronic and Talgo.

The Alvia train derailed is a Talgo 250 Dual, a hybrid model which allows for circulation in different-width tracks: with the maximum speeds of 250 km/hour in the international track width UIC (1.4 meters) and of 220 km/h in the Spanish width (1.6 meters). It performed its first commercial service in Spain in the Galicia-Madrid line, in June 2012.

The Rio de Janeiro-São Paulo-Campinas high-speed train, the first in Latin merica, will have a length of 511 km and will join together the most-populated cities of Brazil, operating a corridor which agglutinates 20% of the Brazilian population, some 40 million people, and which accumulates 33 % of the Brazilian GDP.

It is expected that the bid tenders of Phase I of the project will be delivered in mid-August this year.

Spain counts with the first high-speed network of Europe and the second in the world, just behind China.

Also read:

Doubts and certainties after the disaster

Fonte: Expansión