Lack of maintenance, outsourcing and climate change: what's behind the railway chaos

BarcelonaFatal accidents. Landslides. Sinking structures. Questionable maintenance. Lack of investment. Mutinous train drivers. These are just some of the issues that have characterized this tragic week on the Catalan rail network, which ends with a fatal accident in Gelida (preceded by another in Córdoba), three landslides, the collapse of two retaining walls (in Gelida and Pineda), and dozens of minor breakdowns. This unfortunate series of events has led the Generalitat – the body responsible for the service – to announce another shutdown of the entire system this Saturday morning. This has left Catalonia without rail service.More than 1,400 kilometers of track, but no trains.

The fact that endemic underinvestment is one of the key factors that has led the network to its current state is a widely shared reflection, not only by governments and opposition parties, but also by experts and railway workers themselves. This week, the train drivers' protests have forced the administration, Renfe, and Adif to redouble their efforts to guarantee safety when boarding a train. Without success. This Saturday at noon, the Minister of Territory, Silvia Paneque, admitted that the minimum conditions are not being met.

The debate that has occupied the sector since Tuesday is clear: how exactly is maintenance being carried out to guarantee safety? And also, how are increasingly frequent phenomena caused by climate change—such as storm surges and maritime storms—integrated into prevention strategies, given their significant impact on the deterioration of already battered infrastructure? Can we normalize shutting everything down every time there's a storm? At ARA, we wanted to gather explanations from railway technicians and experts with years of experience in the sector.

Maintenance and subcontracting under scrutiny

The upkeep of the tracks and their surroundings, the most hotly debated issue these days, falls under the responsibility of the state infrastructure manager, Adif. "Renfe is in charge of keeping the trains running smoothly, and Adif inspects the infrastructure," Francisco Cárdenas, a former train driver with over 40 years of experience and a railway representative for the UGT union, explained to ARA. He further detailed that train drivers submit daily reports to the companies, known as the PIR, the mandatory incident report. "We report what we see and what happens to us during the journey to a committee at our company [Renfe], and if they deem it necessary, they pass it on to Adif, which, by the way, usually responds evasively, or at least that's how I see it, frankly," Cárdenas added.

Adif explains that three types of maintenance are carried out: corrective maintenance, which is done when a breakdown is detected, at any time of day; Predictive maintenance continuously monitors the infrastructure and the condition of the tracks, overhead lines, and signaling and safety systems; while preventive maintenance involves scheduled inspections and patrols by machinery and on foot. Most of this work is carried out at night, between services. "It's comprehensive, scheduled maintenance, and, when necessary, corrective maintenance. The tracks don't close at night," say spokespeople for the management company.

Juan Carlos Salmerón, a railway expert and director of the Terminus Transport Studies Center, explains that while track inspection machines don't run daily on commuter lines, as they do on high-speed lines, it's considered that "when the maintenance machines are withdrawn, they already do the work of checking that there's nothing on the track." Salmerón recounts that apart from more specific tasks, such as when something breaks down, general inspections are carried out "more infrequently." These are comprehensive evaluations and scheduled expeditions, specifies Adif, using machines such as laboratory trains or track inspection trains, profiling machines, and ballast rollers, which check, redistribute, and compact the ballast (the stones on the tracks). "This allows us to measure track and geometric parameters and compare the values ​​with the limits established in the technical regulations," Adif explains. Inspections are also carried out by vehicle and on foot.

"Over the last few years, Adif has outsourced and subcontracted a lot of these repair and maintenance jobs," explains Salmeron, who asserts that this in itself poses a problem. "Before, it was Adif staff, but now it's external teams, which doesn't mean they do a bad job, but it's not the same staff who knew the area and the condition of each track. There's a lot of team turnover," he explains. Cárdenas, with extensive experience on the tracks, confirms this: "Before, Renfe supervised, but now the subcontracted company's staff are the ones who make sure everything is correct."

"Adif is still largely out of the spotlight and perhaps should be more involved. It's all very opaque," says Adrià Ramírez, president of the Public Transport Promotion Platform (PTP). "We are very critical of how investments have been made in recent years, because we believe that the most needed projects are not being prioritized. They talk about it in terms of quantity." millions “And while it’s true that more investment is being made, we’re coming from some dark years, from 1990 to 2018, and we lack data on what’s being done now,” Ramírez continues. Daniel Albalate adds, “I think this is the distinguishing factor for Cercanías (commuter rail), because maintenance shouldn’t be very different from what they do in other parts of the network.” Ultimately, it’s super-intensive; you have an asset that’s at the end of its useful life: things will keep coming up and we can patch things up, but the asset’s performance is already highly dysfunctional. This is what’s happening to the Cercanías network, which no longer performs as it should,” Albalate argues. “Not enough has been invested in modernizing the systems and replacing assets.”

Cárdenas believes that not all necessary actions are expensive or impossible to carry out. "The vegetation, for example. There are times when the train drivers can't even see the signs properly! We report that, and also when we feel vibrations, but we don't know about the condition of the walls, since we can't really assess the speed at which we travel," laments the workers' representative. "The situation with the trees is spectacular," confirms Ramírez, "they're constantly falling down, and it shows that graphs of millions invested don't always reflect reality. Are they being invested wisely? Are the processes adequate? Are they well coordinated?" he questions. Another common measure, Ramírez comments, is reducing speed as a preventative measure. "What happened on the Barcelona-Madrid high-speed line, reducing speed, is something we experience every day on the commuter rail. It affects the quality of service and is just a temporary fix," he observes.

External factors: climate change and wear and tear

"It's still raining heavily, and as long as it continues, we can't guarantee safety." This statement was made yesterday, Saturday, by the Minister of the Presidency, Albert Dalmau, during his appearance to explain the complete suspension of service. And for experts, it's one of the key points: "We're not adequately considering climate change in our forecasts," says Salmerón. This railway expert emphasizes the need for contingency protocols and a "strategic defense" of railway infrastructure. "We're having more and more storms like the Glory"It affected and destroyed bridges and infrastructure over 150 years old that had never been damaged until then," he points out. For Salmerón, defending against climate change means anticipating it within the conservation and maintenance strategy. "We have to cut vegetation, ensure that structures are well-drained, and if structures aren't well-drained, they can still break. It's also necessary to build coastal protection against storms," ​​he says. "We have to plan for all of this because it's already upon us."

Climate change, agrees Ramírez of the PTP, presents "extra challenges." "Resilience, resilience, and resilience. Extreme weather events force us to better protect ourselves," he insists. "Everyone understands that a DANA (isolated high-level depression) has unpredictable consequences, but a simple upswing shouldn't affect us in this way. We know that Ferrocarrils de la Generalitat (FGC), which manages its own infrastructure, is responsible for its own infrastructural issues," he says. Train drivers see it this way too: "We've had a run of four or five years where this has been very noticeable," admits Cárdenas. According to Albalate, there are many temporary solutions: "From raising platforms, building walls, restoring beaches... Engineers have multiple solutions, but most are temporary." The professor believes that at the heart of the debate lies a pending "social choice." "The definitive solutions are indeed very expensive, and would involve burying or elevating tracks, or routing them underground, with a significant urban and investment impact. At this point, as an economist, I would say that what's needed is a socioeconomic assessment. We have to see what the disruptions to the commuter rail system entail and weigh the costs, considering the economic implications and taking into account the cost-benefit analysis," he explains.

Stop everything as a preventative measure

All the experts consulted agree that "shutting everything down" was "useful and necessary" last Tuesday, after the Gelida accident. The serious incident highlighted that the storm's effects were more severe than expected and that the network needed to be reviewed step by step. But it cannot be the definitive solution in terms of prevention. "It can't be the solution forever; contingency plans are needed," insists the director of Terminus. Cárdenas agrees and says that "there's still a lot of work to be done." "We need to intensify the inspections, do them better and more frequently, and thus gradually bring all the infrastructure up to date. That way, when something small is detected, it will be addressed in time and won't be so serious," says this former train driver and union representative. Cárdenas points out the "disproportionate" investment in conventional commuter and regional lines (carrying approximately 130 million passengers annually) compared, for example, to the high-speed rail line between Madrid and Barcelona (carrying approximately 14 million passengers annually). The Public Transport Promotion platform also notes that suspending the entire network has an "enormous" social (and economic) cost and puts strain on other mobility systems, such as buses and highways. "We propose continuity protocols with proportionate measures such as slower train speeds, readily available alternative transport options, or prior inspections of some lines before rush hour, to guarantee safety without causing a complete breakdown in mobility," they stated this week.

"The priority now must be to get the commuter rail service up and running, taking into account the impact of the yeast, with all the planned investments," Albalate says. "When all these ongoing projects are finished, we will certainly have to think about more definitive structural investments for greater service reliability in a much more climatically challenging coastal environment, consider the best solutions for each critical point, and analyze the estimated investment and its cost-benefit ratio."