BarcelonaThree hours of meeting and ten agreements on the table. The Generalitat, the Spanish government and the presidents of Adif and Renfe have left the emergency meeting this Sunday - convened yesterday by the Department of Territory - with a list of measures that should help improve the train service in Catalonia or, at least, avoid The chaos in railway mobility experienced in the last seven days.
Among the agreements, the parties have committed to hiring more staff to "intensify" the inspection of tracks and reinforce Renfe's information and management centres as well as the staff for immediate assistance to users. According to the regional minister for Territory, Silvia Paneque, incidents must be dealt with "more quickly" and users must be treated "exquisitely". The reinforcement of human resources in Renfe and Adif is one of the key ideas to emerge from the meeting. On the one hand, Adif's night inspections will be reinforced - those that ensure that the infrastructures are ready for the following day - and the staff selection processes that are underway to cover vacancies in technical positions will be accelerated. On the other hand, and as regards Renfe, the information and management centres and the staff that assist users in the event of an incident will be reinforced.
Precisely for this reason, it has been decided to create a technical office - based in Barcelona - to manage and monitor the actions. The councillor has emphasised that this should guarantee that "work is coordinated and that there is monitoring before, during and after the start-up, with the incidents kept to a minimum, controlled and reviewed". In addition, it has been agreed to inform the Generalitat of all actions that affect users with six months' notice.
As for the works where the service has had to be cut for more than a week, once traffic has been restored there will be no activity with passengers without there having been a "test run" period. This period will be one day for cuts of more than a week and two days for cuts of more than a month.
In a press conference after the meeting, the councillor pointed out that if this had happened when the service was resumed after the works in Roda de Berà, it would have been possible to "ensure that the infrastructures were ready" and the impact on users would have been avoided. In this regard, Paneque confirmed that the teams mobilised in Roda de Berà have closed all the incidents linked to the works and the problems with the catenaries.
"Intense but fruitful" meeting
In addition, it has been agreed to increase the regular meetings to monitor the actions to improve the system. In addition, the Government, the Spanish government, Renfe and Adif have committed to establish bi-annual meetings with the platforms for users and for the defence of railway transport.
According to the councillor, the meeting has been "intense but fruitful" and it has been emphasised that "large-scale investments" are being made in the commuter rail network after "having suffered many years of disinvestment". In this regard, Paneque has said that the network "is not even close to what it should be" and has admitted that they have found it "worse than one could imagine".
The Councillor for Territory, Sílvia Paneque, has arrived at the offices of Renfe and Adif at around midday. The Secretary General for Territory, Housing and Ecological Transition, Jordi Terrades, and the Secretary for Mobility and Infrastructure, Manel Nadal, also attended the meeting on behalf of the Government. The Secretary of State for Transport, José Antonio Santana Clavero, and the President of Renfe, Álvaro Fernández, connected to the meeting telematically.
The meeting, however, was delayed two hours from the scheduled time. It was due to start at 11am but the President of Adif, Luis Pedro Marco de la Peña, did not arrive on time. At 1pm the meeting still began with the head of infrastructure management absent, who joined the meeting an hour and a half later. The reason is that Marco de la Peña, who was going to travel from Bilbao, was travelling by plane on a flight that was delayed due to weather.
Adif president Pedro Marco de la Peña (with briefcase) during his arrival at the meeting in SantsPau de la Calle
Chronology of a week of daily incidents
The Government called this meeting yesterday morning after a chaotic week in rail mobility. The three breakdowns yesterday, which cut off high-speed train traffic in Catalonia twice and forced 400 passengers from a fast Ouigo train to evacuate on foot along the tracks, were the straw that broke the camel's back after five days of daily incidents. Paneque demanded "immediate solutions", however, he stressed that current investments should serve to start seeing improvements in the network and in the service.
On Friday, more than a hundred passengers from a train stopped in Bellvitge also had to reach the station on their own feet, walking along the tracks, after a drop in voltage due to a breakdown left the train they were travelling in without power. The evacuations on foot, by means of the tracks, on Friday and Saturday were the unfortunate culmination of a very complicated week.
Last weekend, union protests forced the cancellation of a hundred commuter trains in the middle of Carnival. On Monday, Councillor Paneque and the director of the commuter trains, Antonio Carmona, arrived 50 minutes late on an inaugural train that was supposed to symbolise the resumption of the service between Tarragona and Barcelona, afterFive months of cuts due to construction work. Two hours later, train traffic between Sant Vicenç de Calders and Cunit had to be cut off due to a power outage.
On Tuesday, a large rock fell on a train on the R3 – which links Barcelona with Puigcerdà – leaving three people slightly injured and forcing the track to be closed. That same day, again in Tarragona, the section between Torredembarra and Sant Vicenç de Calders was experiencing delays of more than half an hour on six commuter lines.
On Thursday, it was the information system that was blown up. The public address system and the commuter screens were out of service throughout Catalonia all morning. Problems continued in Tarragona and a road service was set up to cover the section between Sant Vicenç de Calders and Cunit for the following day.
The Bellvitge breakdown on Friday and two other high-speed train breakdowns and another on the commuter train on Saturday close this fateful chronology.
The opposition criticises the fact that the Government leaves the meeting "empty-handed"
The opposition was quick to denounce the meeting between the Minister of Territory, Sílvia Paneque, the Minister of Transport and the top officials of Renfe and Adif. The spokesperson for Junts in the Parliament, Mònica Sales, has assured that the Government has come away "empty-handed". "There are no measures to reverse this situation that affects many citizens every day," said Sales in a message posted on social media. Juntos called the meeting "nonsense" and reproached the Generalitat for not "standing up to Madrid" to defend users of Cercanías de Catalunya. "We once again see this silence and this lack of leadership from the Government," she lamented.
For Sales, the problems of the Catalan train network are "the result of the constant and permanent disinvestment of the Spanish government" and he reproached the president of the Generalitat, Salvador Illa, for being "totally absent" in this controversy. "There is a lack of leadership that we miss from a president of the Generalitat," he said.
From ERC, Oriol Junqueras said this morning that the heads of Renfe and Adif should resign "if they are not capable of doing their job." He said this in an interview on Catalunya Ràdio in which he expressed his concern and indignation at what he described as the "catastrophic" operation of the trains. For the leader of ERC, the need for the transfer is evident and he gave the example of the Railways of the Generalitat of Catalonia (FGC): "It is proof that the trains of Catalonia can work well."
The Commons, for their part, regretted that the minister had left the meeting without answers on "what is failing in Cercanías" nor "a clear timetable for solutions." In a message to X, her spokesman in the Parliament, David Cid, said that "the highest priority in infrastructure must be the train" and announced that on Monday they will register the request for a monographic plenary session on rail transport in the Parliament.
On the social level, users have also expressed their discontent. The Trens Dignes de las Tierras del Ebro y Priorat Platform has announced demonstrations at different stations in Catalonia on Saturday 22 March if there are no "immediate solutions" to the southern corridor of Cercanías. The Platform speaks of an "evident collapse" and "degrading treatment" of users in Tarragona, Ebre and Priorat. "The situation is extremely serious and the material and conservation conditions of the infrastructure are terrible and deplorable. We must act firmly and consistently to solve a situation that has been unsustainable and unworthy for users for some time," said the Trens Dignes Platform. "The collapse of the southern corridor is hurtful and the result of serious neglect on the part of the administrations," stressed the entity.
Trens Dignes has welcomed the apologies of the president of the Generalitat, Salvador Illa; the Minister of Territory, Silvia Paneque; and the director of Cercanías, Antonio Carmona, but considers that "it is not enough". "We are simply asking for something as simple, but apparently so utopian, as good management," they conclude. In parallel, the Assemblea Nacional Catalana (ANC) announced a few days ago that it was calling for a demonstration to protest against the "chaos" of Cercanías on Saturday 5 April at the Sants station in Barcelona.
![Adif president Pedro Marco de la Peña (with briefcase) during his arrival at the meeting in Sants](data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 1434 955"%3E%3C/svg%3E)
![Chaotic morning at Sants station due to an incident with the overhead lines of a high-speed train.](data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 16 9"%3E%3C/svg%3E)
