Working group to promote rail activity in Catalan ports
The ports of Tarragona, Barcelona and the Generalitat de Catalunya are working to promote transport
The ports of Tarragona and Barcelona and the Department of Territory of the Generalitat of Catalonia have had a first work meeting to promote a common agenda of projects, including promoting rail activity.
(20/02/2023)
Both ports share the goal of expanding and improving rail infrastructure to avoid a loss of competitiveness and to meet European objectives. To this end, two working groups have been created, one on decarbonization and the other on railway issues.
The three institutions will work on the European objective of ensuring that freight transport by rail reaches 20 percent of the total by the year 2030. The three parties agree on the need to improve rail infrastructure in Catalonia, connections with Aragon and France and the deployment of intermodal terminals that allow connectivity.
Tarragona
In addition, from the Port of Tarragona they consider it necessary to reach a territorial consensus to obtain a definitive solution for the passage of goods through the Camp de Tarragona. In this regard, they have explained that the entry into operation of the Mediterranean Corridor with the third thread is a temporary solution that in a few years will be saturated, which will create a bottleneck in Tarragona. For this reason, they affirm that it is urgent to work on the definition and construction of a railway route through the interior that connects the ports with their hinterland.
This port allocates various investments to promote sustainable freight transport, with the construction of the Port Tarragona Terminal Guadalajara-Marchamalo, the expansion and modernization of the La Boella intermodal terminal and with improvements in the internal network and they estimate that “it is vital that this effort is also carried out in the railway infrastructures of the territory”. Another request is that the implementation of new activities in the Logistics Activities Zone be treated as a national project, since it is a logistics annex to a major port in the Mediterranean.