Welcome to European Tribune. It's gone a bit quiet around here these days, but it's still going.
Display:
Compare and contrast. Status of Spain's high-speed network in February 2011 (click to enlarge in-page):

... and now:

My drawings atop a map from Wikimedia. Legend:

  • Dark red: in service
  • Red: in construction(some of these are built as broad-gauge line upgrades, but prepared for quick re-gauging, 25 kV/50 Hz electrification resp. 're-voltaging' and use at 250-300 km/h)
  • Blue: commitment to start construction in the near future in the last few months
  • Light blue: lines promised in the past by one government or another, but not advanced at present

The new PP government (elected in November 2011) was a bit less brutal than its anti-rail-anyway Portuguese counterpart: they continued construction that was already begun (albeit at a slower pace), and stopped "only" all tendering (all the blue to light blue changes), later going ahead with only a few projects (up until now mostly in Galicia). But they go about it in a sneaky way: for example, the construction of the (Zaragoza-)Castejón-Pamplona project was supposed to start tendering in 2011, then nothing happened and the government kept mum, until they came forward with plans for a standard-gauge extra track along the conventional line as replacement project.

*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.

by DoDo on Sat Jun 29th, 2013 at 02:25:15 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Others have rated this comment as follows:

afew 4

Display:

Occasional Series