The Ministry of Development has opened an alternative way to try to reduce the previewed delays on the works of Mediterranean Corridor, without changing the budget and without expecting that the Junker fund impulses the construction of energy infrastructures and transport. The axle, which will arrive to Valencia and Tarragona, will have a delay of at least two years, according to Ferrmed, one of the organizations that has impulsed the railway interconnection of merchandise.
One of the introduced modifications in the Law of Ports was the creation of the Financial Fund of Port Earth Accessibility, an instrument to construct accesses that will be financed with the resources generated by the port authorities that have gained benefits, that offers its excess in a credit format. Ports of the State, which depend on Development, are convinced that it’s the best method to assure the interconnection of the Mediterranean Corridor. But there’s a risk that those links will finish before the improvement of the railway lines, as is the case of the corridor.
That’s why the modification of the Law of Ports has introduced another variable. It will give the possibility that the actual license of the ports extends until a maximum of 50 years – now 35 – its licenses. In return, they will have to compromise to “an additional relevant investment; a contribution to the financing of infrastructures of the terrestrial connection of ports; and for last, the reduction of the maximum tariffs that could be applicable”. In between these named investments, there’s a possibility that has been opened to finance “the improvement of the general network of transport, to benefit the intermodality and the railway transport of goods.”
The President of the Ports of the State, Jose Llorca, says that, in the absence of the draft of the regulation that will develop the modification of the law, that point could be used to construct from railway sidings to facilitate the flow of merchandise trains that share the tracks with traveller trains to the financing of the third railway link. This has become the cheapest option of Development to turn the line of wide iberian in a first version of the corridor.
The construction of the third railway track to obtain the wide international had to arrive in 2015 to Valencia and in 2016 to Alicante and Murcia, dates that the general secretary of Ferrmed, Joan Amòros, considers realistic if they work with political will and less investment. He even considers the construction of a third link between Vilamalla and Portbou – which the Generalitat thinks will cost 40 million – to take from this Access charge up to France.
