The Minister of Transport and Sustainable Mobility, Óscar Puente, has called on his European Union colleagues to speed up the manufacturing and delivery times for railway rolling stock.
He explained that the average delays in train delivery are around two and a half years across Europe and reach three years in Spain, which means that "new trains take approximately eight years to enter service from their acquisition."
Puente conveyed this concern at the meeting of the EU Council of Transport Ministers this Monday, where he recalled that "in no case in recent years have the trains ordered from the main European manufacturers been delivered on time."
During the session held in Luxembourg, in which transport officials analyzed the most urgent challenges in the sector on a European scale, the Spanish minister defended the need to accelerate both the production and delivery of new trains.
He warned that "in Spain, the continued delay in the delivery of new trains deteriorates service reliability, increases operating costs due to the maintenance of obsolete fleets, and slows down the growth plans of the continent's main companies."
His intervention in the European forum comes just two days after he announced, in the Cantabrian town of Reinosa, during a PSOE event held on Saturday, that the first narrow-gauge trains committed by his Ministry to Cantabria and Asturias will be available in the first half of 2027.
By those dates, some of the new commuter trains will already be in the testing phase, Puente pointed out, adding that he hopes they will also be in commercial service. The initial agreement, when manufacturing began in February 2024 —after the scandal of the previous models that "did not fit through the tunnels" due to a measurement error—, set their arrival in Cantabria for the first half of 2026.
Multiple causes and coordinated responses
In his presentation to the European ministers, Puente indicated that the reasons for these delays are varied: very high demand, complex and unharmonized certification procedures, lack of standardization in production, or the absence of a community-wide testing circuit.
In his opinion, these factors also demand diverse solutions, always coordinated within the framework of the European Union.
For this reason, it has urged the European Commission to promote spaces for dialogue with high-level representatives of all stakeholders involved in the railway industry —Member States, train manufacturers, and the European Union Agency for Railways itself—.
That "high-level dialogue," it has pointed out, must bring about concrete measures that allow "to reverse this problem that is hindering the sector's competitiveness," as the minister has reiterated.
In addition, the EU Council of Transport Ministers has addressed other key issues for the transport sector, such as decarbonization policies, the new maritime and port industrial strategy, the sector's response to the crisis in the Middle East, and several legislative initiatives in progress, including the Regulation on air passenger rights and the rules on military mobility.