Oviedo (EFE).- High-speed rail will arrive in Asturias during the month of November with the entry into service of the Pajares variant, a 50-kilometre-long piece of equipment that has involved an investment of 4,000 million euros and It includes twelve tunnels, two of them 25 kilometers long, making them the seventh longest in the world for railway infrastructure.
The General Secretary for Infrastructures, Xavier Flores, announced this Wednesday the opening date of the variant after meeting with the Asturian Government after Adif completed its construction on February 21, which should have been completed in December despite problems with the supplies of materials and the increase in the prices of raw materials will delay that period.
If this calendar had been maintained, this month of May the commercial opening of an infrastructure whose construction began in 2004 with a planned investment of 1,085 million and which has always been the subject of political controversy due to its design and delays in its execution should have taken place. : Announced for 2010 and given 17 different opening dates, all missed.
According to the Ministry, with the inauguration of the variant, the four hours and fifteen minutes that the fastest train now spends between Oviedo and Madrid -of which two hours are consumed on the journey to or from León- will be reduced to just under three hours between both capitals, a calculation made for a service that does not include stops.
Archive image of the works in the Pajares variant. EFE/ JL Cereijido.
The 25-kilometer tunnels under the Pajares port have an average slope of 1.7 percent; 214 fans and 58 connection galleries between its tubes -for maintenance and evacuations and constitute, according to the Ministry, the largest railway engineering work in Spain.
The new infrastructure starts in the Leonese municipality of La Robla and extends to Campomanes, and in Asturias it will allow the circulation of passenger and merchandise convoys and will be traveled in about 15 minutes after shortening the current route by about 37 kilometers.
Until now, all traffic coming from Asturias or towards the Principality circulated through the so-called ‘Pajares ramp’, a route built in 1884 that has 79 tunnels and where trains run at an average speed of 60 kilometers per hour and a maximum of 105 and that will remain unused since adapting it for the transport of merchandise would require an investment of 1,200 million.
According to estimates by the Asturian Government, once the line between Madrid and Asturias is consolidated, the number of travelers who will arrive in the Principality by train will rise to almost 600,000, 147 percent more than the 241,700 who did so in 2019, the last year. before the pandemic. EFE