Renfe will face from next year the French public operator SCNF as a major rival on high-speed roads. Adif, the public company that manages the Ave networks has preselected SCNF and the consortium formed by Air Nostrum and Trenitalia on Wednesday as rivals of the Spanish public company since December 2020, when its monopoly will end.
Specifically, Intermodalidad de Levante (Ilsa), a company of the owners of Air Nostrum, and its Italian partner will remain with the group of railway circulations and frequencies called 'B', which includes starting 16 trains a day in the set of the three runners that open up to the competition: the AVE to Barcelona, the AVE to Levante and the one that connects Madrid with Seville and Malaga.
On its side, the SNCF, through its Spanish subsidiary Rielsfera, has made the so-called 'C' package of services, which includes five circulations per day along these three same lines.
Renfe, as expected, has been left with the largest package of rail services of the three in Liza, the 'A' package, which includes a maximum of one hundred daily frequencies in all three corridors, given that, At the moment, it is the only operator with the capacity to provide it.
From this moment on, Renfe prepares for a competition that will put pressure on the price path in its most profitable corridor, Madrid-Barcelona. In the coming weeks, it will launch its new brand of low-cost tickets , which it will start selling in January.
During Holy Week, it will start operations with adapted trains thanks to the inclusion of more seats per car and the suppression of services such as the cafeteria. The French SCNF will place its low cost operator Ouigo on the AVE tracks a few months later, already offering connections from Madrid with France.
Next steps
Once Adif has awarded these 'packages' of services in the AVE network, the next step, already planned for the first months of 2020, will be to sign the corresponding framework agreements with them. In this way, the winning companies have a period of almost one year to design and prepare their business plans and thus be able to start providing passenger train service as of December 14, 2020, when this sector is liberalize throughout the EU.
The rest of the companies that have competed to position themselves in the AVE market and that, for the moment, fail to enter are the Andalusian firm Eco Rail, the group formed by Talgo, Globalia and the Trilantic fund, and the one formed by the companies of Globalvía and Moventia concessions, collects Europa Press.
The selection process has left out the consortium led by the Spanish train manufacturer Talgo , which had given strategic status to this contest by signing as president Elena Salgado , former Minister of Economy with the socialist government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. Adif has highlighted the transparency of the selection process.
With the opening to competition in train transport it is intended to take full advantage and make the Spanish AVE network profitable , in whose construction 51,000 million euros have been invested, and which, with its 3,200 kilometers in length, is the second largest in the world behind that of China and the longest in Europe.
Likewise, it is intended to attract a greater number of travelers to the railroad, which is also the most sustainable means of transport, and to reduce the price of AVE train tickets .
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