Page 483 - 360.revista de Alta Velocidad - Nº 6

High Speed Rail in Spain - a statement from a foreign expert

3.5 Comment on the present AVE timetable

With the present more or less irregular timetable including such different travel times between
two cities as demonstrated for the Madrid - Málaga direction RENFE never will be able to receive
sufficient revenues from the AVE traffic, which are necessary to justify the huge investment
costs for this traffic.

3.6 Comparison of travel times

It is necessary to compare the fastest AVE travel times between Madrid and Barcelona respective
Sevilla with those of some other countries that carry out high speed rail. For this step it is
important that the distances of the connections are nearly the same as Madrid - Barcelona and
Madrid - Sevilla.

3.6.1 Direction Madrid - Barcelona

The comparison shows the data for a nonstop train in this connection. All data are taken from
the timetable effective from July 2017.
Table 1. Travel time comparison of two railway connections in Spain and China

distance train running travel
Connection Country speed time
(km) number (km/h) (min)

Madrid P.d.A. - Barcelona Spain 621 several 300 150
Guangzhou South - Changsha South China 618 G 66 300 137

The figures in the last column require an explanation. RENFE puts too much recovery time into
the running time in order to be punctual. A Swiss countryman, who travelled with a nonstop
AVE Barcelona - Madrid, once told the author that he had watched an earlier arrival of almost 8
minutes at Madrid P.d.A. This observation proves that the present nonstop travel time Barcelona
- Madrid contains too much recovery time.

For this detail a comparison with daily operation process on the Tokaido Shinkansen Tokyo -
Osaka in Japan is useful. In the Annual Report 2016 JR Central informs about the daily operating
performance: number of services per day: 358, average delay time pro train: 0,2 minutes [4].
And opposite to RENFE JR Central reaches this goal without any prolongation of running time
and lengths of stop in stations. And on top of it from the fastest train category, the Nozomi
train, 4 trains per hour and direction run during day time and 6 trains per hour and direction
run during normal peak time. And all these Nozomi trains have to take into account 2 or even 3
overtakings of slower trains on their running between Tokyo and Shin Osaka.

3.6.2 Direction Madrid - Sevilla

The comparison of the travel times is shown in the table below. The data for Spain and China
are taken from a timetable, effective from July 2017, those from Japan effective from March
2017.

International Congress on High-speed Rail: Technologies and Long Term Impacts - Ciudad Real (Spain) - 25th anniversary Madrid-Sevilla corridor 481