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A cascade of journey time reductions: the Transport Infrastructure Plan drawn up by Spain's Development Ministry envisages the construction of no fewer than 7000km of high-speed rail lines. The first of these, linking Madrid with Seville, opened in 1992, followed in October 2003 by the initial section of the 855km Madrid--Barcelona--French border line.

Article Excerpt
HIGH-SPEED rail services now connect the 481.6km between Madrid, Zaragoza and Lerida. As far as the rest of the line to Barcelona and the French border is concerned, work is either underway or adjudicated on a further 237km, leaving the remaining 137km in the project or study phase. Electrification contracts for the Lerida-Barcelona section have already been placed.

GIF, the high-speed infrastructure authority, recently awarded a 625 million [euro] contract to a consortium led by Siemens and including Alcatel and Westinghouse Signalling, for signalling, telecommunications, and power supply for the Lerida-Barcelona section, plus two other sections of new line: Segovia-Valladolid and Madrid-Toledo. The signalling will be designed for Levels 1 and 2 of the European Train Control System (ETCS).

The Madrid--Lerida line has a 14m-wide track bed on which two standard-gauge tracks have been laid. Maximum gradients have been limited to 2.5%, with exceptional sections of 3%. Most curves have a minimum radius of 7250m, although exceptionally these can be 6500m. The line is electrified at 25kV ac.

Although built to enable trains to operate at 350km/h, the line's new ETCS signalling system has so far failed to demonstrate sufficient reliability to enable Spanish National Railways (Renfe) to make operational use of it. Instead, trains are limited to 175km/h using traditional Asfa back-up signalling. Even so, journey times between Madrid and Zaragoza have fallen by 1h 15min to 3 hours, while Lerida can be reached in 2h 4min instead of 5 hours.

Gauge-convertible Talgo trains are running beyond Lerida to Barcelona, with the fastest service taking no more than 4h 30min, although stopping trains take five hours, a saving of...