The company, a union of Air Nostrum and Treintalia, estimates an investment in trains of between 220 and 240 million for that corridor
AVLO has already announced its interest in reaching this community, while Ouigo rules out its arrival in the north of the country for the time being
High Speed arrived in Galicia thanks to Renfe on December 21st, almost 20 years after its announcement, but one of the two new private operators who have entered Spain already plans their arrival in this region and sets a date, “from 2026”. This is how he revealed Victor Banares Yebenesthe CEO of Ilsaa company formed by Air Nostrum (55%) and Trenitalia (45%), in an intervention in the Committee on Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda of the Congress of Deputies.
Ilsa has not yet started its activities in Spain, it plans to do so from last quarter of 2022 with the commercial brand ‘iryo’, connecting Madrid with Barcelona, Seville, Malaga, Cordoba, Valencia, Alicante and Zaragoza. For this, this company will have a fleet completely new 20 units of the ETR 1000 – the famous Italian Frecciarossa– manufactured between Italy and Spain by Hitachi Rail in collaboration with Bombardier Transportation (now the Alstom group) which represents an investment of close to 700 million euros, at a rate of 35 million per train.
But, to get to Galicia, you need a few different trains, as this community has two types of different track widths: international Gauge, in the section that goes from Madrid to Ourense, and iberian width, inside the region. This causes the company to have to make a investment in new trains for which it plans to start “at the end of this year” the process of analysis of type of machines you need, as well as that forecast of the necessary investments. But, in a gross calculation, according to the figures provided by the general manager of the company, the investment will be in the area of between 220 and 240 million eurosat a rate of between 22 and 24 million euros per train for a total of ten machines.
It’s the first time you wear date to the arrival of Renfe’s competition to a corridor other than the three currently awarded (Madrid-Barcelona, Madrid-Levante and Madrid-Seville and Malaga). To do this, the railway infrastructure operator Adif must convene a contest a capacity for a certain period so that companies can have a long-term vision and thus ‘guarantee’ the amortization of the investment.
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Although interest in the Galician corridor is not new, something that Renfe’s ‘low cost’, AVLO, has already made public, guaranteeing its expansion to Galicia, as well as other private companies, according to sources from the Executive. The Secretary of State for Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda, Isabel Pardo de Vera, confirmed this point at the end of November, when the AVE had not yet arrived in Galicia, during the presentation of ‘iryo’: “There are companies that are showing great interest in this process and are already asking us about the opportunities that exist in other runners like the one in Galicia, which is about to go into high speed,” said Pardo de Vera at the time.
The only private operator that currently runs on the Spanish high-speed lines (Madrid-Barcelona), the French operator Ouigo, has ruled out reaching the north of Spain, at least for now. “We would love to go to Galicia but it requires variable width material and one voltage of 3000 – 25000 volts. We have 14 trains with an investment of more than 600 million euros and our trains They are not compatible with this infrastructure”, pointed out the general director of Ouigo Spain, Helene Valenzuela, in the same forum as his colleague from Ilsa. The company, which has acquired a package of 30 trains (15 return trips per day) in the three corridors of Madrid to Barcelona, Levante and AndalusiaNor does he rule out putting it on the table in the future, once he has gained experience in Spain. “We would love to go to Galicia, we would love to go to the Basque Country in the future, but that is another project”, has added.