Palencia, Jul 25 (EFE).- The High Speed to Cantabria has collided with a wall in Palencia.
Just outside the city, within the construction project, ADIF contemplates an elevated walkway that divides neighborhoods and that may be incompatible with the informative study of the undergrounding of the train tracks approved in 2010.
A “nonsense” that the City Council wants to stop
A “nonsense” that the Palencia City Council wants to stop.
The new mayoress of Palencia, the socialist Miriam Andrés, is forceful about it. “Palencia has never renounced burying the train tracks as they pass through the city,” she maintains in statements to EFE.
The informative study for the integration of the railway was approved in 2010 and revalidated in 2018, underlining the support of the city and all municipal political groups for this project, although some concessions would have to be made until the great work arrived, as happened with the controversial Los Tres Pasos flyover built in the north of the city in 2017.
The AVE to Cantabria
Since then, with many difficulties and at different speeds, the High Speed sections to Cantabria have been awarded and tendered.
This is an infrastructure that involves the construction of a new standard gauge line between the capital of Palencia and Alar del Rey (Palencia) along 78 kilometers and which will be completed to Reinosa, with a budget of 1,700 million euros.
In November 2022, Miguel Ángel Revilla, one of its main supporters, demanded that the Minister of Transport, Raquel Sánchez, (during the commissioning of a new link on the A-67) to expedite the high-speed rail works between Palencia and Santander: “Minister, I am 80 years old and I want to go on that train”, stated the then Cantabrian president.
The minister made a commitment and the Ministry complied, so that today all the Palencia sections of the future AVE that will bring Santander to Madrid are already contracted or under construction.
A wall at the exit of Palencia
However, high speed has now found a wall just outside the capital of Palencia, in the initial section of the AVE to Cantabria.
A wall that can slow down the progress of the project and put an end to Revilla’s emergencies.
The Palencia-Palencia Norte section (1.3 km) awarded at the end of 2022 with a budget of 26.8 million could collide with the informative study of the burial of the railway in the city of Palencia, which has been approved and waiting for more than a decade.
This was denounced last June by Ecologists in Action and the Citizen Platform in Defense of the Underground Railway in the City of Palencia, who have asked the ministries for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge and Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda to annul the approval of the construction project for this section.
A petition that has been joined by the new socialist government team in the Palencia City Council, led by Miriam Andrés.
The mayoress has already set to work to prevent this first section from being executed as drawn on paper and thus avoid “the nonsense” that it would mean for the city, since it contemplates the construction of a 14-meter-high walkway in the heart of the town.
The arguments against that wall of the AVE to Cantabria
Among other aspects, the underground area is reduced by approximately 500 meters compared to the 2,740 meter underground area approved in the Integration of the Railway in the city, leaving four neighborhoods of Palencia definitively disconnected.
In addition, a new layout is proposed that is not contemplated in said studies, so that, for the new route to have legal validity, the approved Informative Studies would have to be annulled and another Informative Study for the integration of the railway in the city of Palencia drawn up.
The execution of this construction project would imply the impossibility of executing the burial approved in 2010 and revalidated in 2018.
Disconnect neighborhoods
It would definitively disconnect the neighborhoods of El Cristo, San Juanillo, San Antonio and Sector 3 from the rest of the city; and it would suppose a very negative urban environmental impact.
As Andrés points out, the San Antonio neighborhood and the Camino Viejo de Husillos will be the most affected by this project, since it includes the construction of what is called “salto del carnero”, a 14-meter-high wall that will serve to save the different routes of the railway junction in the north of the city.
“In the informative study of the underground, the departure of the AVE to Cantabria is done from underground to the surface and in the ADIF construction project it is done through this walkway. All nonsense ”, explains the mayoress
The City Council wants ADIF to modify the layout
To avoid this, the first thing that has been done is to request reports from the Urban Planning technical and legal services to endorse the position of the new government team.
Because if this incompatibility with the informative study of the underground in Palencia is demonstrated, “ADIF would be breaking the law.”
You have to make it compatible
If so, the idea is clear: ADIF has to modify the layout making it compatible. “And if not, let them begin with the burial now.
That no longer depends on us”, maintains the mayoress, who, in addition to requesting an update on costs from the Ministry, wants to clarify that the High Speed project to Cantabria is in no way paralyzed, but “ADIF has to solve the problem of the exit in Palencia because it is incompatible with burying, yes or yes”.
Meanwhile, to gain time, the City Council has halted the works to change the location of the collector on the Camino Viejo de Husillos, essential for ADIF to place the footings and pillars of the “Salto del Carnero”.
A walkway out of town
“We are not going to touch the collector,” says Andrés, hoping that by stopping these works, ADIF will be forced to reconsider the project.
The goal is for this catwalk to be outside the city because, as the mayor points out, “we cannot allow it to be in a neighborhood of the city.”
In addition, it must be taken into account that, like the one built in the Three Steps, they are provisional solutions and will have to be demolished when the burial is carried out.
In this sense, Andrés insists that Palencia has never given up on burying the train tracks. Although he regrets that the previous government team (CS-PP) ignored the report issued by ADIF before bidding for the project. “Given the administrative silence, ADIF began the process to award the works,” he explains.
That and that the Infrastructure Administrator has skipped another step, by not submitting the construction project of the High Speed Train for consultation, as it appears in the burial study since 2010. EFE