Page 210 - 360.revista de Alta Velocidad - Nº 6

Coronado, José María. Ureña, José María.

1. Introduction

This section is dedicated to explain the context of the research presented in the paper. In
April 1992 Spain inaugurated its first 471 km of High-speed Rail (HSR), the Madrid-Seville
line. This line was going to serve only these two cities and Cordoba, but in 1989 Ciudad
Real and Puertollano were also included in the project, because it had to pass close to
them anyway. These two cities had been for two centuries distant from the main Spanish
transport corridors.
Shortly after the HSR services were in place a new medium distance HSR service was created
to connect Ciudad Real and Puertollano only to/from Madrid reducing this travel distance
by two thirds and opening up the possibility of daily commuting to/from Madrid with a HSR
travel time around one hour. This made that these two small cities improved tremendously
their connection to Madrid (around 20 services per day and sense), to the other cities in the
corridor (ten services per day and sense) and through them to other cities/regions.
The implications derived from HSR (an only passenger railway service) in these cities described
in literature (Urena, 2002 & 2002a; Ribalaygua, et al., 2003 & 2004; Ureña, et al., 2005;
Menéndez, et al., 2006; Serrano, et.al., 2006; Garmendia, et al., 2008, 2009, 2011 & 2011a;
Ureña, et al., 2009; Ureña, 2012) can be synthesised in the following:

- Growth expectations not fulfilled. An important population growth was expected, as if
they were suburban metropolitan cities (with campaigns in Madrid of “Come to live at
Ciudad Real”).

- Time distances to other main settlements in the province are equalized to those to
Madrid and Cordoba.

- Generation of high professional level commuters (twice as many from Ciudad Real and
Puertollano to Madrid than reversely).

- Attraction of quality services (health, university, etc.) to these cities, with high qualified
professionals commuting from Madrid.

- Development projects related to transportation and leisure (Airport, Golf and Gambling
tourist destination) and to economic activities.
- Location of inhabitants within the two cities were not substantially influenced by the
location of HSR stations.

The enlargement of the Spanish HSR network with ulterior lines (see Figure 1), Córdoba-
Málaga,Madrid-Barcelona, Madrid-Valencia and Alicante and Madrid-Valladolid-León and
MadridValladolid-Zamora, improved the connectivity of these two small cities with direct HSR
services to most of the cities along these new lines (all except Segovia, Valladolid, León and
Zamora) providing a great efficiency of HSR, only behind Madrid (see Table 1) . In a certain sense,
1
these connectivity improvement has made these two small cities become cities in movement,
with their inhabitants traveling frequently to other places for multiple purposes.

1 The HSR tunnel connecting Atocha and Chamartin Madrid stations, to be inaugurated soon, will allow direct HSR services from
Ciudad Real and Puertollano to the cities along the North (Segovia, Valladolid, Palencia) and Northwest (Zamora) lines, improving
even more the connectivity of these two small cities.

208 360.revista de alta velocidad