215 minutes. That is the time that it should take a high -speed train to travel the distance that Vigo separates from Madrid from this month of March.
It is not a figure that we have said randomly. It is the promise in which Oscar Puente reaffirmed at the beginning of this 2025, since since the arrival of the Avril there was talk of connect Madrid and Vigo In just over three and a half hours. The same day in which it also took advantage of confirming that the number of places offered would be expanded by 125%.
The problem is that those 215 minutes remain, right now, a promise. What are real are the delays and breaches that have accumulated since in May 2024 the first trains arrived at the railway line. The first day, the train that promised to reduce travel time in 15 minutes was exceeded half an hour above the scheduled. The second day, the delay went above two hours.
Then, the Vigo-Madrid had to be done in four hours, with the promise that time should be filed over time. It improved … little. In August of last year, just one in five trains that covered the journey arrived at the expected hour. And we are already in March 2025 and there is no trace of those 215 minutes desired.
So Abel Caballero, mayor of Vigo, has had a proposal: why not eliminate stops in Castilla-León?
A direct Madrid-Vigo
In case Spain was devoid of storms in recent days, Caballero decided to generate his own on the afternoon of March 19. That day a meeting had been organized between Mayor Gallego and Álvaro Fernández Heredia, new director of Renfe. After the same, Caballero exposed what had been talked there.
The mayor of Vigo said that he had presented some alternatives to Fernández Heredia to reduce until three hours and 45 minutes the time that Madrid separates from his city. The proposal was clear: Eliminate stops in Castilla-León. He did not explain which but he said the following:
“The current travel time on one of the tours is very elongated by an excessive number of stops in the area of Castilla y León, a area already close to Madrid that currently has a very important coverage of trains that come from all over the north and the rest of Galicia on high -speed paths”
The words were collected by the local medium Atlantic.net. The proposal, according to Caballero, had had “very good reception” and Fernández Heredia would have been “very receptive.” And, of course, the winds unleashed the storm.
Renfe has left has denied Caballero, ensuring that the stops that are currently in Segovia, Medina del Campo, Zamora and Sanabria High Speed will not be suppressed. Before, Alfonso Fernández Mañueco, president of Castilla-León, had already shown his anger crossing the intentions of “intolerable”, they collect in The Spanish.
The crossing of statements, of course, has been felt throughout the day of March 20, with cross messages between members of the PSOE (to which Caballero belongs) and the PP (to which Mañueco belongs) both Galicians and Castellanoleonese, as well as the different political parties that give voice to all the affected provinces, such as Zamora or Segovia.
The conflict, however, exemplifies the wounds that have opened with the expansion of high speed east of the country. One of those wounds is found in Zamora. Already in May 2024 they collected in Vigo that a possibility that was on the table to reduce the times was to skip the stop in the city “that will have 12 trains a day per sense despite having 60,000 inhabitants.”
Another key places that lengthens the trip in Madrid-Vigo is its forced passage by Santiago de Compostela. No direct connection between Vigo and Orense (just over an hour by car) is obliged to the high -speed train to deviate 70 kilometers to cover the entire journey and reach Vigo. This alternative has been on the table since 2001 but Puente avoided last year to give a concrete date of when the project could be ready or, at least, if at any time it would be approved to it.
Although Madrid-Vigo has focused all eyes for obvious reasons, confrontations on the occasion of high speed are common in Spain. In the Basque Country, it is not only that high speed arrives with decades of delay, at this time there is a strong confrontation to choose the path that the “and Basque” with high speed from Pamplona must connect. Everything seemed aimed with a step by Vitoria but an alternative is contemplated by the Gipuzkoan town of Ezkio/ITSASO, by the Sierra de Aralar.
The connection in AVE Madrid-Lisboa has also been disputed. Among the latest discussions, that of the Ministry of Transportation, led by Puente, with the Government of Castilla-La Mancha and the municipalities of Toledo and Talavera de la Reina, in relation to whether a new train station should be built in the first case or if the roads in the second should be buried.
But these have been the last fringes because the cities of Badajoz and Salamanca They have been faced for years in a discussion that has recently been given folder when Puente confirmed, again, that the journey between Madrid and Lisbon would pass through the Extremadura city.
Photo | Namor88 and Pedro Vicente Seoane Prado
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