The spokesperson for Aragón-Teruel Existe, Tomás Guitarte, has denounced that "they are trying to pass off a cat for a hare" because "the works that are on the line cannot be considered, in any way, the Cantabrian-Mediterranean corridor that European regulations contemplate and that even Spanish planning contemplates. That was a double-track corridor, a high-performance corridor for both passengers and goods, and that is not being fulfilled."
He has announced that his party will demand from the Ministry that "it withdraws the informative study it has presented, that it rewrites it or that it returns to previous stages of it, where there were indeed commitments and studies on double-track routes. And, really, not to try to deceive the citizens again. What is being done, or what is intended to be processed, is not the Cantabrian-Mediterranean corridor that Aragón needs."
Guitarte has referred to the response of the European Parliament to a question about the Teruel-Sagunto section of the Cantabrian-Mediterranean corridor, which has an informative study whose public exposure recently concluded "and which we question from the entire autonomous community."
As he recalled, "this response to the question comes to confirm another response that was already given in 2024 to another question also posed in the same Parliament. But it has an additional significance: it is issued by different officials. The Commissioner for Transport is a different official in one case and in another. In both responses, both in 2024 and in 2026, it is stated that the Teruel-Sagunto section, which in the 2024 response is mentioned precisely when it had just been declassified as a high-speed section and the track between both points was treated as a conventional track, is included, just like the entire Zaragoza-Valencia section, within the basic network of the Trans-European Transport Network. And, as such, it must meet a series of technical requirements that it is evident that the informative study submitted for public information does not meet," he argued.
For Guitarte, "this reaffirms us even more in our positions, because, of the allegations we presented from Teruel Existe, the main one, with which our entire document opened, was precisely to point out that the framework of Regulation EU 2024/1679 was not being fulfilled."
It has pointed out that the non-compliance occurs because the maximum speed planned for this section, aiming to minimize costs, is 140 km/hour, when European regulations establish that, in these corridors, the minimum speed must be 160 km/hour, and for goods, a design of 100 km/hour is proposed. In his opinion, "therefore, in that aspect, but also in other very substantial ones, such as, for example, the interoperability of the entire section, the regulations are also not being met," he asserted.
He added that "the Mediterranean corridor we are going to connect is a corridor designed in standard gauge. Here, the option of track in Iberian gauge is simply transferred. That is to say, the study that has been submitted for public information does not comply with the technical regulations that correspond to a basic network of the European Union transport network. Therefore, what this response does is reaffirm again, through two different commissioners, that the Government of Spain is playing dirty, because it tries to make us believe that the works on the current line are the works of the promised and committed Mediterranean corridor. And that is not true," he added.