Page 80 - 360.revista de Alta Velocidad - Nº 5

Piqueras, Anibal. Saura, Joan. Paños, Francisco.

of its current rolling stock material, along with the rail infrastructure manager ADIF and its
implementation plan.
The most important issues during and after the implementation of the Castellon-Vandellós
section in standard 1435 mm uic gauge are:

a. The continuity for the long-distance passenger rail services in standard gauge
b. The continuity for the medium-distance and regional passenger rail services in standard gauge
c. The continuity for freight rail services in standard gauge

Due to the non liberalisation of the rail passenger market in Spain, both a) and b) issues may
be tackled by the incumbent operator Renfe. On the other hand, as rail freight services are
liberated from 2007, it is not an easy task to solve the third issue c) as many stakeholders are
now involved.
Furthermore, the continuity for the passenger long-distance trains is also assured at a significant
proportion. This is because most long-distance Renfe services in the BarcelonaValencia corridor
are already provided by automatic variable gauge trains. However, regional services and freight
services may be analysed more carefully.

In the next Table 3 the operational services are presented in the Castellón-Vandellos section.

Table 4. Operational services in the Castellón-Vandellós section.
Source: Adif (freight operations), Renfe (passenger operations)

Daily Daily freight Daily
Mediumdistance/ trains from Longdistance Total
N. Section km
regional passenger Monday to Friday passenger services/day
services (average) services
Vandellós - L’Al- 32 12 28 72
1.1 dea/Amposta/ 37
Tortosa (16/direction) (6/direction) (14/direction) (36/direction)

L’Aldea/Amposta/ 8 12 28 48
1.2 Tortosa - Caste- 116
llón (4/direction) (6/direction) (14/direction) (24/direction)

Total length 153

As we have said before, long-distance passenger services are already provided by automatic
variable gauge trains (both Renfe series 130 and 121). Thus, there would not be impediments
to give continuity to the 28 long-distance services showed in Table 4 .

In reference to the medium-distance/regional passenger services we find two subsections with
large differences in terms of the total amount of services. On the one hand, in the VandellósTortosa
we find 32 regional services; on the other hand, in the Tortosa-Castellón we just find 8 regional
and medium-distance services. It exists such a difference of services between these subsections
because Tortosa is the last stop of the medium-distance R16 line which connects Barcelona and
Tortosa. In these two cases, a migration in the existent rolling stock material will be mandatory
to allow services in standard track gauge. It is noteworthy to say that it already exists some
Renfe series such as the S449 that already has the standard gauge "preinstalled" in the coach.

78 360.revista de alta velocidad