High-Speed Railways in Spain

History

The history of high-speed rail in Spain began two decades ago, in 1986, when the government decided to further the country’s investment in rail. At the time, involved officials in Ministries of Economy and Transportation and the office of the President debated whether to develop improved and additional conventional rail lines or take the plunge with high-speed. Spain has a particularly high density of air travel, with each regional capital having its own airport, and the government determined that high-speed rail presented the best economic and environmental alternative to attract people away from planes and cars.

As to where that first line would run, the government chose the Madrid-Seville route. Though it might seem less logical than linking the two major economic centers, Madrid and Barcelona, a number of factors made this track a clear first choice. Before 1986, traveling to Seville from Madrid meant a long, indirect route over a single-track rail. “This was technically the most important bottleneck in the network,” says Joaquín Jiménez, director of international relations for ADIF (the Spanish acronym for the Railway Infrastructure Administrator). Says Jiménez, “This line was the one where, with the least investment, we could dramatically cut the distance for the largest number of passengers by building a new line entirely, not running parallel to existing train lines.” In addition, the World Expo planned for Seville in 1992 gave the government a time and goal to work toward.

There were practical economic reasons to choose Seville for the first destination. That same year, 1986, Spain entered the European Union. With the entrance, the Spanish government had access to EU funds for infrastructure development, and the government decided to invest in the development of the relatively impoverished region of Andalusia.

The construction of the line was hampered by the need to cross the Sierra Morena mountains. “Spain is the second most mountainous country in Europe, after Switzerland,” says Juan Matías Archilla, director of international relations for Renfe, the Spanish rail operator. Today, improvements in tunnel engineering assist in the development of shorter rail lines; Spain is currently building one of the longest rail tunnels in the world north of Madrid, crossing the Sierra de Guadarrama along the new high-speed route between Madrid and Valladolid and serving the entire northwest of Spain.

It took only six years for the 471-kilometer line to be completed, an unusually short time for a line of this distance. It cost about a third less than similar lines—in part because of the dogged commitment of the local and national government to achieving the goal in time for the World Expo.

After the trains finally reached optimal speed, it took just two hours and twenty minutes to reach Seville. Before, any rail traveler would spend nearly triple that, about six hours. Riders soon arrived in droves, and the line proved to be a crucial link in the economic development of the region.

After the success of the Madrid-Seville line, the economic crisis of 1993 hit Spain, along with much of the rest of the world. It wasn’t until 1997 that the country found itself on strong enough economic legs to return to the theme of high-speed rail. The view automatically turned to developing the route between Madrid and Barcelona, with the idea of cutting travel time from six and a half hours down to about two and a half.

In 2003, the next line of Spanish high-speed rail (known by the Spanish acronym AVE) opened in Spain: from Madrid northeast to Lleida, which is the beginning of the lines both to Barcelona (to open in 2007) and to the French border. The trip time was reduced by half. By early 2005, a shorter-distance high-speed line opened up southward from Madrid to the nearby town of Toledo. By the end of 2006, the southern lines stopped along the coast; they will reach the popular tourist destination of Málaga by 2007. Construction is already in advanced stages for lines reaching the Mediterranean coast and the French border.