The railway access to La Cabezuela surpasses the legal impediment preventing their tendering

The President of the Port Authority stresses the importance of this progress and announces an imminent meeting with the presidency of ADIF and Puertos del Estado to finalize the implementation schedule.

Railway access to the La Cabezuela-Puerto Real dock, a strategic infrastructure demanded for twenty-five years by the Bay of Cadiz Port Community and by public institutions, political, economic and social agents of the bay, has overcome the legal obstacle that has prevented its implementation, despite having since 2016 the necessary funding for its development by State Ports.

“Today is a great day for the Port of Cadiz because we will finally have the connection with the Central and Mediterranean Railway Corridor”, declares the president of the Bay of Cadiz Port Authority, Teófila Martínez, who highlights the importance of “this definitive step in which we have been working in recent months” and announces in the coming days a meeting with the president of ADIF, Isabel Pardo de Vera, and the president of Puertos del Estado, Salvador de la Encina, in order to be able to specify the calendar for the execution of the project.

“This is one of the great obstacles that prevented us from making certain plans.

of the future and that we have been able to eliminate,” says the president.

Background

As you know, in January 2009, the Ministry of Development put out to tender the execution of the project, which was awarded in July of the same year to the joint venture formed by Ploder Uicesa and Vialobra, for an amount of 19.45 million euros and 32 months of execution.

In the month of March 2010, one of the two companies that make up the successful joint venture presents voluntary bankruptcy of creditors, which paralyzes the work.

In July 2015, the Distribution Committee of the Inter-Port Compensation Fund, in which the 28 Spanish Port Authorities are represented, unanimously approved that Puertos del Estado assume the execution of the railway access to the La Cabezuela dock under the Port Land Accessibility Financial Fund.

The project, whose investment amounts to 26.5 million euros, will be financed by Puertos del Estado, while the work will be executed by ADIF, which already has the execution project and was only pending the resolution of the legal barrier, to be able to tender it.

In order to accelerate to the maximum the execution of the work, once tendered, the

Port Authority has held in the last month a meeting with the commission of monitoring of the work to make progress in the diversion of affected roads and services

(power lines, sewage and water pipes, telecommunications, etc.).

As the sector has argued in various documents sent to the competent authorities, the entry of the train into the Puerto Real dock is fundamental for port development and is a key factor in the competitiveness of the Port of the Bay of Cadiz, as it will make it possible to lower the cost of transporting goods – mostly raw materials – and to access the most remote areas more economically, while at the same time providing an environmental bonus as it is a means of transport that respects the environment.

The implementation of the railway access to La Cabezuela would also lead to an increase in port traffic and a diversion of part of the goods currently moving from road to rail, as the Port Community has argued, providing service not only to companies related to port activity, but also to the entire industrial environment.

It should not be forgotten that today the port activity in Cabezuela-Puerto Real accounts for more than 63 percent of the traffic of the bay, above the dock of Cadiz.