I've spent the last days of the year
2012 in Alicante, a city I hadn't been to since the early 1980s, so
as far as urban rail is concerned it was a first-time visit anyway,
as my interest in this form of transport was not as developed back
then and also, Alicante didn't have any urban rail system in those
days. After almost a week here, I have to say that Alicante is not
really among my favourite Spanish cities, but it has fantastic
beaches nearby, some of which are also easily accessible by
tram/train. Unfortunately there are no tourist or railfan-friendly
day passes, so you need to buy a new tickets for each ride (you're
not even supposed to get off and jump on the next one after taking a
photo...). But fares are rather cheap for European standards, 1.40
for a single ride in zone A which takes in all L3 and L4, with a
10-ride ticket even cheaper. A same-day return to Benidorm is 6.15.
Although officially a bilingual city like the entire Comunitat
Valenciana, station names within Alicante city are predominately
shown in Spanish only, whereas in other parts they may also be in
Valencian (Catalan). Renfe, the national rail operator, along with
ADIF, the rail infrastructure company, however, now use 'Alacant' for
their station.
The present urban rail system is still
rather undeveloped, and it is actually a border case, not sure
whether it is really urban, although lines L3 and L4 connect outlying
parts of Alicante city and El Campello, which is part of the
continuously built-up area, with the city centre. Those areas are
separated from the city proper by the Serra Grossa mountain. The
30-minute headway on these two lines doesn't make them too
attractive, and at least the area of Playa San Juan served by L4 is
also accessible by bus, probably more frequently and faster. The
system is complemented by L1, which is more of an interurban
tram-train that also runs every 30 minutes to reach Benidorm, 45 km
northeast on a very scenic coastal trip. At Benidorm, a diesel train
continues hourly as L9 to Dénia, also a very panoramic journey. L1
does not stop at all stops on the inner section which are served by
the local L3 instead. The stops most frequently served are La Isleta
and Lucentum with six trams an hour. The L1/L3 runs directly along
the beach between Costa Blanca and Les Llances stops, so that's a
good area for photos and for swimming, too. And then there is still
line 4L, a shuttle connecting the main route at Sangueta (located in
the middle of nowhere) to Puerta del Mar, right by the harbour
promenade. This shuttle also operates every 30 minutes and despite
its number links with L1 trains, not L4. It is barely used and will
therefore be discontinued soon. A typical case for Alicante's bad
planning! Despite the single-track line between Sangueta and Puerta
del Mar it would no doubt be possible to operate this shuttle every
15 minutes, even without a second tram, and this would make it much
more attractive for local rides, but a wait of 20 minutes or so to
connect with L4 is a bit too much! Also, the intermediate stop La
Marina, the old railway's original terminus, is not accessible from
the beach promenade.
While the initial idea to convert an
old narrow-gauge coastal railway into a tram-train was quite good,
and L1 seems to be pretty busy (despite the location of Benidorm
station far away from the beaches and a rather exhausting climb up
the hill from the town centre!), anything else seems to lack a proper
public transport concept. Although there are shared tickets between
TRAM and buses, the two don't really appear to be integrated
properly. If you happen to see a bus map somewhere, it doesn't even
show the underground TRAM stops. Building a route underground through
the city centre was possibly based rather on 1960s concepts to
reserve the surface for vehicle traffic and an excuse to build large
underground car parks along with the two underground stations in the
centre, Luceros and Mercado. In my opinion, a surface route would
have been enough here and it would have helped to actually bring the
tram into people's mind, make it visible. But they keep it well
hidden, as the entrances to those important stations don't even have
a logo to show their location. Until you actually stand in front of
them, you don't see them and in two cases at Luceros, you are never
quite sure, whether this is an access to the car park or to the
station! When you stand in front of the market hall, you can't really
see the underground station, as it is one block up and has no signs
indicating its existence, just your intuition or the help of a local.
Metro logos are not only good for passengers, but also a useful point
of orientation for car drivers or pedestrians, therefore in some
cities they are actually hung over the road intersection to be
visible from some distance. There is a nice logo pole at Puerta del
Mar, so why don't they put them also at the other stations, even the
surface ones?
When I first entered Luceros station, I
wasn't quite sure whether this wasn't the car park anyway, as the
vestibule features a no-design design, bare plastered walls painted
in a vague beige/grey lead your way to a large mezzanine ready to
take large amounts of passengers but always quite deserted when I was
there. Once you get down to the platform it is a pleasant large and
well-lit space with an island platform, with trains reversing in the
cul-de-sac already built beyond the station in provision for an
extension to the railway station. This extension will probably take
many more years as it has to be done together with the new railway
station, which is being built in stages, and as they are currently
even delayed with building temporary platforms there to bring
high-speed trains to Alicante in 2014 or so, it will take at least
5-10 years until the entire station complex is finished, if it is
ever finished.
Mercado station lies even deeper than
Luceros, and despite its black walls in the mezzanine and platform
level has an interesting feel. There is just one thing which I simply
cannot understand: if this is the station which serves large parts of
the city centre including the Old Town, why did it not deserve
escaltors from the mezzanine to street level? Instead the stairs are
actually rather steep to climb. Luceros, however, has up and down
escalators at two of the four entrances. The third underground
station, MARQ is a bit east of the city centre and features a big
hole at its eastern access so daylight falls into the station while
the western exit requires three flights of escalators to reach the
surface. Right after MARQ trains come to the surface and climb onto a
viaduct that spans over a large roundabout. This is followed by a
grade-separated junction where L2 will diverge (see below).
When the old line was first electrified
in 2003, it ran single-track from Puerta del Mar to La Isleta. With
the first new section into the city centre, about half the section
between Sangueta and La Isleta became double-track, but now with
three lines operating every 30 minutes in each direction, this has
become a major bottleneck. Instead of doubling only the single-track
section with a new tunnel under the Serra Grossa mountain nearby,
they chose to build a longer double-track tunnel which will hopefully
be completed soon, as digging seems to be finished, but no funds are
available to lay the tracks. And given the current financial
constraints, it is not quite sure whether there will be more trams
once it is operational. My innocent mind makes me wonder anyway, why
they didn't dig a tunnel from La Goteta on L2 towards La Isleta??
Probably because it would make the lack of long-term planning even
more evident... The original route had nice views, but with most now
in tunnels anyway, this advantage is gone, too.
All the surface stops are
well-equipped, with maps, almost too huge timetables and electronic
next-train indicators (showing the time of predicted departure rather
than the minutes remaining). From what I have observed, punctuality
was quite good.
L2 has probably become the most
ridiculous public transport issue in Spain. There are other tough
cases, like the now-closed tram in a small town called Vélez-Málaga,
the still not opened tram in Jaén or the hardly useful 'metro' in
Palma de Mallorca. Like Valencia, Alicante lies in the Comunitat
Valenciana, one of Spain's autonomous regions. The regional
government is responsible for the construction of metros and trams,
and so far, both in Valencia and Alicante, the region-owned company
FGV also operates them. Probably because of the many strikes they
have at FGV (I also caught some over Christmas!) they wanted to find
a private operator for L2, but thought that this would be for cheap.
So they couldn't find one! Not even the typical ones like Transdev,
Keolis and the likes that participate in all European tenders. So the
line is fully built like a modern French tram line, even traffic
lights seem to be switched on, trams have done their test runs, but
still after two years of completion, it is not in service. This is a
real SHAME! How incompetent can a government be! If they received a
single eurocent from EU sources to build it, the politicians
themselves should be forced to pay all the money back from their
private pockets! And L2 would finally make the system worthwhile as
it runs through densely populated areas and serves the University
too! FGV says they could start service immediately if they were told
to do so.
But even when L2 is finally in service,
many parts of the city will still lack tram service, notably the
western areas. The first proposal that comes to my mind is to extend
the soon-to-be-closed branch to Puerta del Mar along the esplanade
around the central city to the railway station, where it would
intersect with the trunk route and what they call Cercanías. Instead
of continuing with an underground route further west as had been
proposed, I would bring the trams back to the surface and create
several branches. It has been suggested to extend L1 all the way to
the airport and possible even to Elche, so this would create a 100 km
long regional tram-train route. But unless the country recovers
quickly from this financial bottleneck and more capable politicians
come into power, we will hardly see much progress in Alicante in the
next decade, I'm afraid.
Besides urban rail, a lot of money has
also been invested in recent years in this part of Spain in new
railway and road infrastructure. I'm not anti-motorway, but from what
I could observe driving around the region of Alicante for three days,
a lot of money was wasted in dual-carriageways to rather small towns
and an excessive number of roundabouts where besides the main road
the only exits show 'camí' (camino = farmer's access to fields...).
Like with the urban railways, all these motorway-like roads seem to
lack an overall concept resulting in a badly-signed labyrinth of
roads with confusing road numbers (I reported a few errors even to
Google Maps), but that's a different story.
The high-speed rail line from Madrid
(which is in service as far as Albacete) is almost completed all the
way to Alicante, but the city's terminus is not. The branch to
Murcia, which diverges some 15 km before Alicante is also mostly
built and roughly follows the old railway line, just like a link
between Valencia and Alicante. In these two cases I thought that it
would easily have been enough to finally upgrade the old lines. It
seems that through the wealthy early 2000s (or presumably wealthy)
Spain always went for the big solution, while prior to that and until
now nothing much has been done to keep the old lines in good shape.
In the case of Alicante, it has never occured to anyone, it seems, to
build a short curve of 1-2 km at San Gabriel, where trains that run
from Alicante to Murcia have to reverse. While this is probably not
so bad for local trains which have a station stop there anyway,
long-distance trains like the Talgo from Montpelier to Cartagena thus
reverse once at Alicante Terminal station and a few minutes later
again at San Gabriel. I wonder if someone remembers what they did in
the old days, when the old Murcia terminal in Alicante was still open
and many more trains went from Valencia towards Andalusia along this
route? I also wonder whether this is the only case in Europe where a
long-distance train needs to change direction without actually
serving a station?
